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whom

pronouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//huːm//
  • United Kingdom//hʉwm//
  • Canada//hum//
  • Australia//hʉːm//
  • Scotland//hʉm//

What person or people; which person or people. As the object of a verb.

pronoun

  1. 1

    What person or people; which person or people. As the object of a verb.

    Whom did you ask?

  2. 2

    What person or people; which person or people. As the object of a preposition.

    To whom are you referring?

    With whom were you talking?

    The stories did not seem to me to touch life. They were plainly intended to have a bracing moral effect, and perhaps had this result for the people at whom they were aimed.

    He read the letter aloud. Sophia listened with the studied air of one for whom, even in these days, a title possessed some surreptitious allurement.

  3. 3

    Used to refer to a previously mentioned person or people.

    That is the woman whom I spoke to earlier. (defining)

    Mr Smith, whom we all know well, will be giving the speech. (non-defining)

    He's a person with whom I work (defining)

    We have ten employees, half of whom are carpenters. (non-defining)

  4. 4

    The person(s) whom; whomever.

    To whom it may concern, all business of John Smith Ltd. has now been transferred to Floggitt & Runne.

  5. 5

    informalAlso used with names of collective nouns that are groups of people, especially singularly-named musical groups or sports teams.

    Whom was Lemmy bassist for? Motörhead!

Etymology

From Middle English whom, wham, from Old English hwām, hwǣm, from Proto-Germanic *hwammai, dative case of *hwaz (“who, what”). Cognate with Scots wham (“whom”), German wem (“whom, to whom”), Danish hvem (“who, whom”), Swedish vem (“who, whom”).

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).