Whom

How to spell whom

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce whom

What does whom mean?

1. pronounThe objective form of 'who', used as the object of a verb or preposition.

Whom in a sentence

• The manager interviewed several candidates, one of whom she later hired.

• To whom should I address this complaint letter?

Where does whom come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Whom descends from the Old English hwam, the dative form of hwa, the ancestor of modern 'who'. That final -m is the last surviving trace of a once-rich case system in which English nouns and pronouns changed their endings depending on their grammatical role, much as German still does today. The same dative -m ending survives in the related words 'him' and 'them', which is why those three forms all end the same way. Over the centuries English shed nearly all of its case endings, but whom clung on as the object form of who, used when the pronoun is the target of a verb or follows a preposition. The spelling trap is simply remembering the silent-looking pairing of o and m after wh, and reaching for whom rather than who when grammar formally demands it.

How the word is built

• who (interrogative/relative pronoun)
• -m (objective case marker, inherited from Old English dative)