“Oh?” she said. “So you have decided to revise my guest list for me? You have the nerve, the – the –” I saw she needed helping out. “Audacity,” I said, throwing her the line. “The audacity to dictate to me who I shall have in my house.” It should have been “whom”, but I let it go. “You have the –” “Crust.” “– the immortal rind,” she amended, and I had to admit it was stronger, “to tell mewhom” – she got it right that time – “I may entertain at Brinkley Court and who” – wrong again – “I may not.”
The stories did not seem to me to touch life. They were plainly intended to have a bracing moral effect, and perhaps had this result for the people atwhom they were aimed.
“A very hearty pip-pip to you, old ancestor,” I said, well pleased, for she is a woman withwhom it is always a privilege to chew the fat. “And a rousing toodle-oo to you, you young blot on the landscape,” she replied cordially.
(relative)Used to refer to a previously mentioned person or people.
That is the womanwhom I spoke to earlier.(defining)
Mr Smith,whom we all know well, will be giving the speech.(non-defining)
He's a person withwhom I work.(defining)
We have ten employees, half ofwhom are carpenters.(non-defining)
“Anthea hasn't a notion in her head but to vamp a lot of silly mugwumps. She's set her heart on that tennis bloke[…]whom the papers are making such a fuss about.”
The eminent brain specialist towhom she alluded was a man I would not have cared to lunch with myself, our relations having been on the stiff side since the night at Lady Wickham's place in Hertfordshire when, acting on the advice of my hostess's daughter Roberta, I had punctured his hot-water bottle with a darning needle in the small hours of the morning. Quite unintentional, of course.
1979 December 29, Tia Cross, “Lesbian Family Album”, inGay Community News, volume 7, number23, page14:
A woman shooting poolwhom you know has red hair even though the photograph is black and white.
(fused relative,archaic outside set patterns) The person(s) whom;whomever.
Towhom it may concern, all business of John Smith Ltd. has now been transferred to Floggitt & Runne.
(informal, especially non-US)Also used with names of collective nouns that are groups of people, especially singularly-named musical groups or sports teams.
Who is asubjectpronoun.Whom is anobject pronoun. To determine whether a particular sentence uses a subject or an object pronoun, rephrase it to usehe/she/they orhim/her/them instead ofwho,whom; if you usehe,she orthey, then you use the subject pronounwho; if you usehim,her orthem, then you use the object pronoun. The same rule applies towhoever/whosoever/whoso andwhomever/whomsoever/whomso. In the case ofwho(m)(so)ever, which usually plays a role in two phrases at once, it is the role in the internal ("downstairs") clause that determines the case. For example,Sell the sofa towhoeveroffers the most money for it useswhoever because it is the subject of the verboffers; the fact that it is also the object ofto is irrelevant.
Who can also be used as an object pronoun, especially in informal writing and speech (hence one hears not onlywhom are you waiting for? but alsowho are you waiting for?), andwhom may be seen as (overly) formal; in some dialects and contexts, it is hardly used, even in the most formal settings. As an exception to this, fronted prepositional phrases almost always usewhom, e.g. one usually sayswithwhom did you go?, not *withwho did you go?. However, dialects in whichwhom is rarely used usually avoid fronting prepositional phrases in the first place (for example, usingwho did you go with?).
The use ofwho as an object pronoun is proscribed by many authorities, but is frequent nonetheless. It is usually felt to be much more acceptable than the conversehypercorrection in whichwhom is misused in place ofwho, as in *the savagewhom spoke to me.
Instead ofwhat orwhich, particularly in music and sports journalism, although a solecism in conventional or traditional grammar,who andwhom are also used with names of collective nouns that define or describe groups of people, for instance singularly-named musical groups or sports clubs, in addition to teams with plural names of anthromorphic non-human beings or inanimate entities.
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions atWiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
