Whomever

How to spell whomever

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce whomever

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whomever mean?

1. pronounThe objective form of 'whoever': any person at all, used as the object of a verb or preposition.

Whomever in a sentence

• The bonus will go to whomever the managers choose.

• Send the invoice to whomever your supervisor names.

Where does whomever come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound built from 'whom' and 'ever', both of which are native English words of Germanic stock. 'Whom' descends from the Old English 'hwām' (later 'hwǣm'), the dative form of 'hwā', meaning 'who'; that dative ending is the historical reason the word carries its tell-tale final 'm', marking it as the object rather than the subject. The reinforcing element 'ever' comes from Old English 'ǣfre', meaning 'always' or 'at any time', and it was added to relative pronouns to broaden them to 'any person at all'. The pairing 'whom' plus 'ever' was written as two words for centuries before settling into the single solid form during the early modern period. Because everyday speech has largely abandoned the older objective 'whom', many writers today struggle to know when 'whomever' is correct, which is exactly the trap: it is grammatically the object form, used where 'him' or 'them' rather than 'he' or 'they' would fit.

How the word is built

• who (relative/interrogative pronoun)
• -m (objective case ending, as in whom)
• -ever (emphatic, generalising suffix)