ACT® · English: Usage Conventions
Who and Whom
Who and whom are the same pronoun in two cases: who does the action, whom receives it. Test it by isolating the pronoun's own clause and swapping in he (who) or him (whom).
Who and whom aren't about meaning or formality, they're about job. Who is a subject, the word doing the verb's action. Whom is an object, the word getting acted on, usually as the object of a verb or preposition. The test for which one belongs isn't guessing by ear, it's substitution: take the clause the pronoun sits in, replace the pronoun with he or him, and see which sounds right. He fits subjects, so he means who. Him fits objects, so him means whom.
The trick that trips people up is scope. A relative pronoun like who or whom only answers to the verb inside its own clause, not to anything earlier in the sentence. So before swapping in he or him, cut the sentence down to just that clause. In 'The candidate who the board selected has resigned,' the relevant clause is 'the board selected ___.' Swap in he or him: 'the board selected him' works, not 'the board selected he.' That means whom is correct, even though the whole sentence's main subject is 'the candidate.'
This topic sits inside the larger family of pronoun case questions, alongside I versus me and other subject-object pairs. The same isolate-the-clause, swap-the-pronoun method solves all of them. Once you can find the boundaries of a clause reliably, who/whom stops being a guessing game and becomes a two-step check: find the clause, then test it.
Key terms
- subject
- the word performing a clause's verb, matched by who and he.
- object
- the word receiving a verb's action or following a preposition, matched by whom and him.
- relative pronoun
- a pronoun like who, whom, or which that introduces a clause describing a noun.
- clause
- a group of words with its own subject and verb, sometimes just part of a larger sentence.
- case
- the form a pronoun takes depending on whether it acts as subject or object.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does swapping in 'he' or 'him' inside the clause settle the choice between who and whom?
- How it worksWalk me through isolating just the clause a relative pronoun belongs to before testing its case.
- Worked exampleFind the right form for 'The candidate ___ the board selected has resigned' between who and whom.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't 'whom' right in 'the runner whom finished first', even with a preposition earlier on?
Check yourself
End of topic.