Whose

How to spell whose

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce whose

What does whose mean?

1. pronounBelonging to or associated with which person or thing; the possessive form of 'who'.

Whose in a sentence

• The manager asked whose car was blocking the loading bay.

• She interviewed the author whose novel had topped the charts.

Where does whose come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from Old English hwæs, which was the genitive (possessive) form of hwā, the ancestor of modern 'who'. The root traces back to a Proto-Germanic interrogative stem, itself from a Proto-Indo-European base meaning 'who' or 'what', the same source that gives Latin quis and quod. In Old and Middle English the genitive 'whose' could refer to people and to things alike, which is why we can still say 'a book whose cover is torn' as well as 'a man whose coat is torn'. The spelling settled with the silent 'wh' and the 'o' vowel by the same path that shaped 'who' and 'whom', a Middle English respelling pattern that kept the historic 'wh' even where the sound had softened. The persistent confusion is not with the origin but with the contraction 'who is' or 'who has', which is written 'who's' with an apostrophe; remembering that the possessive form takes no apostrophe (like 'his' and 'its') is the surest guard against the error.

How the word is built

• who (interrogative/relative pronoun)
• -se (Old English genitive ending, marking possession)

Words that sound like whose

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

• who's: Contraction of 'who is', used in questions and statements about a person's current state or action.