‘Who’ or ‘Whom’ – By Professor Mayfair

Hello Professor. When can we use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ and what’s the difference between them? (Yaiza, Spain).

Hello Yaiza, well if I had a penny for every time a student asked me that I’d be a very rich professor. It’s not a difficult question but you need to know a few basic things about relative clauses.

We use relative clauses to identify people and things and often give more information about them. For example, look at this sentence:

He’s the boy who broke the window.
Main clause                relative clause

Here, we’re identifying who broke the window, ‘the boy’, and giving the information, ‘broke the window’ and ‘He’s the boy’. The subject is ‘he’ and the main verb is ‘broke’. In the sentence we give two sets of information: ‘He is the boy. He broke the window’. So instead of repeating ‘he’, we relate the subject in the main clause with another subject pronoun, ‘who’, in the second (relative) clause. ‘Who’, is known as a ‘relative pronoun’.

But what about this sentence:

He’s the boy who I saw break the window.
   Main clause                  relative clause

Here there are still two sets of information: ‘He’s the boy. I saw him break the window’. Or ‘I saw the boy break the window’.

What’s the subject of this sentence? To answer this question, what is the main verb? Yes, it’s ‘saw’. So the subject is the person or thing that does the verb i.e ‘I’ not ‘he’. ‘He’ is the object. When we use a relative pronoun for the object, we use informal ‘who’ or the more unusual and formal relative pronoun ‘whom’. So we can say: ‘He’s the boy whom I saw break the window’.  We don’t use ‘him’: ‘He’s the boy whom I saw him break the window’.

‘Who’ can be used as a subject or object relative pronoun, but in some situations such as in formal letters or speech we can use ‘whom’ as an object relative pronoun.

You should also remember that we don’t have to use a relative pronoun when it is an object, we can omit it. For example, we can say: ‘He’s the boy I saw break the window’.

Can you do the following exercises? Try to make relative clauses from these sentences and use ‘whom’ whenever possible. The first one is done for you:

1. She’s the actress. I saw her yesterday.

She’s the actress whom I saw yesterday.

2. He’s the manager. I spoke to him last week.
3. That’s the person. I saw him take the phone.
4. Do you remember those people? We met them last year.
5. Is that the person? I spoke to him at the conference.
6. She’s the manager. We had a meeting with her.