Who'd

How to spell who'd

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce who'd

What does who'd mean?

1. pronounA contraction of 'who would' or 'who had'.

Who'd in a sentence

• Who'd have guessed the meeting would run so long?

• The manager asked who'd already finished the report.

Where does who'd come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction that joins the pronoun 'who' to either 'would' or 'had'. The pronoun 'who' descends from Old English 'hwa', the masculine and feminine interrogative meaning 'what person', which traces back to the same ancient root that gave Latin 'quis' and the wider family of question words beginning in English with 'wh'. The 'would' element comes from Old English 'wolde', the past tense of 'willan' (to wish or intend), while the 'had' element comes from Old English 'haefde', past tense of 'habban' (to have). The apostrophe marks exactly where the dropped letters once stood, standing in for the 'woul' of 'would' or the 'ha' of 'had'. Such written contractions became common in English from the seventeenth century onward, and the apostrophe remains the small but essential mark that distinguishes 'who'd' from the plain pronoun 'who'.

How the word is built

• who (interrogative/relative pronoun)
• 'd (contracted 'would' or 'had')