Who's

How to spell who's

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce who's

What does who's mean?

1. otherContraction of 'who is', used in questions and statements about a person's current state or action.
2. otherContraction of 'who has', used when asking or stating which person has done or possesses something.

Who's in a sentence

• Who's coming to the budget meeting this afternoon?

• Who's already submitted the expense form?

• Who's in charge of approving the invoices now?

• She asked who's got the spare key to the storeroom.

Where does who's come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction, not a single inherited word, formed from the pronoun who plus a shortened form of is or has. Who itself descends from the Old English hwa, the masculine and feminine interrogative pronoun meaning 'what person', which traces back to a Proto-Germanic root and ultimately to the same ancient Indo-European stem that gave Latin its quis and qui. The apostrophe in who's marks the spot where letters were dropped when 'who is' or 'who has' was squeezed together in speech, a written convention that became standard for English contractions only after the 1600s. The spelling trap is that who's sounds identical to whose, the possessive form, yet they do opposite jobs: who's always unpacks into who is or who has, while whose shows ownership. Remembering that the apostrophe stands for missing letters, never for possession here, is the key to keeping the two apart.

How the word is built

• who (interrogative pronoun, from Old English hwa)
• -'s (contracted is or has)

Words that sound like who's

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• whose: Belonging to or associated with which person or thing; the possessive form of 'who'.