Who

How to spell who

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce who

What does who mean?

1. pronounUsed to ask or specify which person or people are meant.

Who in a sentence

• The manager wanted to know who had signed the form.

• The colleague who trained me has now retired.

Where does who come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word who descends from Old English hwa, the masculine and feminine interrogative pronoun meaning 'what person', part of a family of question words that all began with the spelling hw, including hwaet (what), hwaer (where) and hwy (why). This hw- cluster goes back to the Proto-Germanic interrogative stem hwa-, which in turn traces to the Proto-Indo-European root kwo-, the same ancient root that gave Latin its qui and quod and underlies a huge number of question words across European languages. Over the medieval period English flipped the written order of the cluster from hw to wh, which is why we now spell who, what and where with wh even though the older form put the h first. In who the w eventually fell silent and the vowel shifted, so the modern pronunciation is simply 'hoo', leaving a spelling whose w and h give no clue to the sound. That mismatch, a silent w and an h that does not behave like the h in hat, is precisely the trap that makes the small word surprisingly easy to fumble.

How the word is built

• wh- (interrogative element, from Old English hw-)
• -o (vowel, here pronounced /uː/)