WHO vs. WHOM - What's the Difference? - English Grammar - When to Use Who or Whom

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While it's true that 'who' is much more common, there are some situations where you should use 'whom' instead of 'who.' We will explore those situations in this lesson, and also look at common prepositional expressions such as 'by whom,' 'from whom,' 'to whom,' 'with whom' and 'for whom.'

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Transcript:

Hey there and welcome back to Learn
English Lab. My name is Ganesh and this
lesson is all about the difference between
who and whom.

This is something
that a lot of students find confusing -
when to use who and when to use whom. In
this lesson, I'll show you how to use
these correctly.

Before we begin,
just remember that if you have any
questions at all, just let me know in the
comments section below and I will talk
to you there.

OK so let's start. Now who and whom are
used in two places - they're used in
questions and they're used in relative
clauses.

First we'll talk about questions
and then we will come to relative
clauses. If you're not sure what that
means, don't worry - I will explain it to
you when we get to that part.

Now here's the rule with using who and whom -
who is used in the place of a subject and whom
is used in the place of an object.

What do I mean by that? Well take a look
at this sentence "Bruce spoke to Betsy." In
this sentence we say that Bruce is the
subject because Bruce does the action
which is speak
past tense - spoke.

And Betsy is the object
because Betsy receives the action. Now
some people might argue - is Betsy really
the object because there's a 'to' which is a
preposition here but you don't have to
worry about that.

For the purpose of this
sentence we'll say that Bruce is the
subject and Betsy is the object.

Take a look at these two questions over here -
there's a blank there - "______ spoke to Betsy?"
Here we want to fill in this blank with
either who or whom - which is correct?

Well if you read the sentence you
realize that we know someone spoke to
Betsy but we don't know who that someone
was. That is we're asking about the
subject so the word for the subject is
who

so Who spoke to Betsy? Now in the second
sentence - of course you must be thinking we
have to use whom here right? You probably
guessed that and that is correct but
before we get to that I'm just going to
write 'who' over here

Now read the
sentence "Who did Bruce speak to?" This is
actually correct in speaking and in fact
when we speak we don't commonly use 'whom.'

In speech we almost always use 'who'
So this means if you are not sure
whether to use who or whom just use who
and you will be OK. Alright but I'm going
to take the 'who' off.

So what about if you
want to write something formal or if you
want to use proper grammatical form?
Well in that case you need to know how
to use whom correctly and in this
question - if you read it "_____ did Bruce speak to?"

Here, we know that Bruce spoke to
someone but we want to ask who that
someone was - that is we want to ask about
the object of the sentence. Remember
Betsy?

So because we want to ask about
the object we have to use whom over here.

Before I write whom just notice that
there's a 'to' at the end of this
question - now in English we have a rule
that we don't usually end a question
with a preposition like to.

These are all
prepositions - to, with, by, from, for etc. So
if you have a
a preposition at the end of
a question you have to bring that to
the beginning before you write whom.

So let's do that - I'm going to put a question
mark there

To whom did Bruce speak? That is actually
the proper grammatical form of that
question. So if you're writing something
formal, this is how you should write it.

OK at this point I'm going to give you
a very simple rule that you can use in
all situations to decide whether to use
who or whom, and the rule is this - when
you're making a question, think about the
answer to that question.

If the answer
can be him, her or them, then you use whom.