Who, Who's, Whose, Whom

Author: Indigo Curnick

Date: 2026-06-20

Perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of English grammar is the use of the word whom. Many people (including me) will correct the use of who to whom where appropriate; but many people (excluding me) can actually explain when whom is correct. In this blog, I shall totally demystify whom forever. Not only that, but we shall also understand who's and whose at the same time.

Who

Who is an interrogative pronoun used to begin questions about people (sometimes animals like dogs, and some inanimate objects which are personified: ships, countries and so on). Interrogative pronouns are used to start questions. For example:

• Who wrote this blog?
• Who paid for the art?
• Who is calling at this time of night?

Who can also act as a relative pronoun. A relative pronoun connects a subordinate clause with the antecedent e.g. "The book that you have is mine". It is confusing that who has a double usage, but generally it isn't too challenging, some examples:

• The man who we just saw is an old friend.
• The nice lady who bakes cakes has lived there a long time.

Who's

Once you nail down who, who's becomes pretty trivial. It is always and only a contraction of either who is or who has. Some examples:

• Who's a good dog? = Who is a good dog?
• Who's at the door? = Who is at the door?
• Who's got the letter? = Who has got the letter?

The simple trick to figuring out if who's is correct is to make the expansion - replace it with who is or who has and see if the sentence still makes sense. For example:

• Who's letter is this? ❌
• Who is letter is this? ❌
• Who has letter is this? ❌

Whose

Whose is a possessive word. Like I has the possessive form my, you can think of whose as the possessive form of who.

Whose and who's are very confusing. The reason is because generally we know 's as being a possessive e.g. Bob's Burgers, Alice's coat. Since who's and whose sound the same, the source of confusion is obvious. Unfortunately, 's serves double duty as contractions, and in this case, who's is always a contraction. Now for some examples:

• Taiwan is an Asian country whose economy relies on computer part exports.
• Alice, whose brother is an economist, is also studying economics at university.

We can also fix our example from earlier!

• Whose letter is this? ✅

Whom

Now we turn to the most tricky of the bunch: whom. Whom is the object form of who. You will be much more familiar with object forms of other pronouns, for example, I and me. Nobody confuses object forms of other pronouns:

• Me like chocolate. ❌
• I like chocolate. ✅
• They like I. ❌
• They like me. ✅

Theoretically, the rule "when acting as an object, use whom" is simple enough, however, in practice, it can be awfully confusing to apply. Here's some tips and tricks to figure it out.

First, whom, like who, has two uses. The first is asking questions.

For questions, a good trick is the he/him test. In the he/him test you can try replacing who/whom with he/him to see which is correct. You can do this by converting a question into an answer and seeing if he/him fits. If he fits, use who. If him fits, use whom. We use he/him because it contains a useful mnemonic: him goes with whom because they both end in m. Some examples:

• Who/whom ate the last biscuit? 🤔

• He ate the last biscuit. Who is correct. ✅

• Who ate the last biscuit? ✅

• Who/whom should I write to? 🤔

• I should write to him. Whom is correct ✅

• Whom should I write to? ✅

The second use of whom, as with who, is introducing relative clauses. Let's look at two sentences:

• The nice lady who/whom bakes cakes has lived there a long time. 🤔
• The man, who/whom I needed to apologise to, is also a fisher. 🤔

The way to figure out whether to use who or whom here is to split each sentence into two independent sentences and work out if both sentences have the same subject.

• The nice lady who/whom bakes cakes has lived there a long time. 🤔
• The nice lady bakes cakes.
• The nice lady has lived there a long time.

We can see that both clauses actually have the same subject, and so who is the correct choice here

• The nice lady who bakes cakes has lived there a long time. ✅

For the second example

• The man, who/whom I needed to apologise to, is also a fisher. 🤔
• I needed to apologise to the man.
• The man is a fisher.

We can see that in this case the two clauses do not have the same subject. We needed to do a little rearranging to get the first clause into an easier form to work with, but we can clearly see that whom is needed here. This is because whom is in fact the object of the verb apologise:

• The man, whom I needed to apologise to, is also a fisher. ✅

The trick can be much more difficult to apply when analysing complex sentences made of multiple clauses, especially when both who and whom are needed in one sentence. Let's take a look at:

• Let's talk about who/whom we should employ and who/whom is eligible for employment. ❔

This is a complex sentence with a few moving parts. As before, to analyse this one we need to break it down into clauses. The first thing to notice is the about separates the sentence into two big chunks:

• Let's talk about who/whom we should employ and who/whom is eligible for employment.

We could replace the whole second half by literally any other noun:

• Let's talk about elephants. (Please! Let's! 🐘)

So we have two simpler clauses to analyse, separated by and:

• Who/whom we should employ. 🤔
• Who/whom is eligible for employment. 🤔

Now these are much easier to tackle. We'll actually start with the second, since it's the easier.

• Who/whom is eligible for employment. 🤔
• He is eligible for employment. Therefore who is correct. ✅
• Who is eligible for employment. ✅

The first is slightly trickier. The problem is, we can't just replace who/whom with he/him but we also must move it to the end of the clause:

• He we should employ. ❌
• Him we should employ. ❌
• We should employ he. ❌
• We should employ him. ✅
• Whom we should employ. ✅

Therefore, our full sentence is:

• Let's talk about whom we should employ and who is eligible for employment. ✅

Another point about whom worth mentioning is it is often paired with a preposition, like to. A general rule of thumb is to not end sentences with prepositions. It's not a hard grammar rule, but as an aspect of style it flows much better. So, if the sentence ends in a preposition, consider moving it in front of whom.

• Whom should I apologise to? 🫤
• To whom should I apologise? 🤩

Conclusion

You'll never confuse who, who's, whose and whom ever again now! Just remember the cheat sheet:

• Who = subject
• Who's = who is/who has
• Whose = possessive
• Whom = object