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In the spirit of the What is a Word™/Phrase™ series started by JLee, a special brand of Phrase™ and Word™ puzzles.

2016 is almost over, so here is an appropriate 'What is a Word' puzzle.
If a word conforms to a special rule, I call it a Final Word™.
Use the following examples below to find the rule.

Final Words ™ Not Final Words ™
ANGEL DEVIL
CHILDREN PARENTS
EARTH SPACE
FURLONGS FEET
GROUND AIR
OVER UNDER
PERPLEXED ASTONISHED
SKIRT DRESS
THRICE TWICE
TOGETHER ALONE
TWELVE THIRTEEN
YOU WE

And, if you want to analyze, here is a CSV version:

Final Words™,Not Final Words™
ANGEL,DEVIL
CHILDREN,PARENTS
EARTH,SPACE
FURLONGS,FEET
GROUND,AIR
OVER,UNDER
PERPLEXED,ASTONISHED
SKIRT,DRESS
THRICE,TWICE
TOGETHER,ALONE
TWELVE,THIRTEEN
YOU,WE

The puzzle satisfies the series' inbuilt assumption, that each word can be tested for whether it is a Final Word™ without relying on the other words.
These are not the only examples of Final Words™; many more exist.

What is the special rule these words conform to?

HINT:

All Final Words™ have been in use for a long, long time.

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    $\begingroup$ Nice :) I wanted to do one of these using KJV but this worked out much better than what I'd thought of. $\endgroup$
    – Rubio ♦
    Dec 29, 2016 at 1:02
  • $\begingroup$ How did you check the correctness of the non Final Words? $\endgroup$
    – justhalf
    Dec 29, 2016 at 3:45
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. I downloaded an XML version of the Bible and wrote a small C# program to extract a list of all Final Words. $\endgroup$
    – Glorfindel
    Dec 29, 2016 at 8:26

2 Answers 2

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Final Words™

end a chapter from the King James Bible.

For example,

Acts 6:15 And all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel (end of Ch. 6)

Notice that

devil ends many verses (e.g. Ephesians 6:11, Matthew 11:18, and Luke 7:33), but none of these are chapter ends.

As another example,

Psalm 58:11 So that a man shall say, verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth (end of Ch. 58)

One final example,

John 13:38 Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice (end of Ch. 13)

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  • $\begingroup$ Damn it. I thought I checked exactly that and found it didn't work. Oh well. $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan ♦
    Dec 29, 2016 at 0:21
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This answer isn't correct, but it may be useful, or possibly on the right track:

All of the words appear in Shakespeare plays. The latest hint says that the words are old.

However, I could not find the rule separating all the Final words from all the Not Final words. So far, I've tried the following, and none of them are the correct solution:

* Words in the final scene of an act, final scene of a play, or final act of a play.
* Words that appear in a specific place in a sonnet (or in a sonnet at all).
* Words that are the final word of a spoken line.
* Words in a specific play (including The Two Noble Kinsmen, supposedly his final play).
* Words that appear in a character's final line(s).
* Words that are only spoken by characters of one gender.
* Word properties such as Gematria, anagrams, ASCII value patterns, Morse, common letters, common substrings, Scrabble scores, rot-n ciphers, or letter position on a keyboard.

Other potentially relevant findings:

* The word "final" appears only once, in King Edward III, Act I Scene i.
* SKIRT appears only once, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act II Scene i.

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    $\begingroup$ There appears to be no pattern in Shakespeare's sonnets, except that ""angel" appears in the last line of sonnet CXLIV, "thrice" in the last line of LVI, and "you" in the last line of XIII. $\endgroup$
    – DyingIsFun
    Dec 28, 2016 at 18:17
  • $\begingroup$ @MikeQ it has nothing to do with Shakespeare, but you've definitely hit the right sort of track. $\endgroup$
    – Glorfindel
    Dec 28, 2016 at 19:27

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