Try ‘him’ before you write ‘whom’

Answer the question the sentence is asking, with ‘he’ or ‘him’, and copy the shape. Many people give the same rule: if ‘he’ fits the answer, the word you want is ‘who’; if ‘him’ fits, it is ‘whom’. ‘Who left this on my desk?’ — ‘He left it’ — who. ‘To whom should I address the form?’ — ‘Address it to him’ — whom. ‘The colleague whom I emailed’ — ‘I emailed him’ — whom. Some people explain why it works, which is the one piece of grammar the page will make you read: ‘who’ and ‘whom’ are the same pair as ‘he’ and ‘him’ — one for the person doing the thing, one for the person the thing is done to or done for — so your ear’s certainty about he and him is borrowed to settle who and whom. Some people give the memory aid: whom and him both end in m; who and he do not. Individual people widen the test: it works with she and her, and with they and them, if those come more naturally; and if the word is followed straight away by a verb — ‘who wrote’, ‘who called’ — it is ‘who’, because ‘whom’ cannot do anything, only have things done to it. Some people add the rule of thumb for prepositions: after ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘with’, ‘from’ — ‘to whom’, ‘for whom’, ‘with whom’ — it is whom, and a knock-knock joke some people tell makes the point: ‘To who?’ ‘To whom.’ Some people point out that this is the same test you already half-know for ‘I’ and ‘me’: strip the other person out of ‘she sent it to Tom and I’ and you get ‘she sent it to I’, which you would never say — so it is ‘Tom and me’, and one person makes exactly that fix. One person says the same subject-and-object habit sorts ‘lie’ from ‘lay’ later, if you ever need it. And one person sets right a word people think is invented: ‘whomever’ is real, and is simply the formal version.

On three kinds of sentence, and people are honest about all three. First, sentences built on ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘are’ — one person warns the test misfires here. ‘Who is it?’ — the answer ‘it is him’ sounds natural and points you at whom, and it is wrong: after ‘is’ the formal grammar wants the doer’s form, ‘it is he’, so ‘who’. Some people name this as the ‘it is he’ case and admit it sounds stiff; one person says ‘this is he’ and ‘whom’ are still what you hear in some offices. Second, passive sentences — ‘Who was given the keys?’ — where one person warns the test does not apply cleanly; the person was given something, but they are still the one the verb belongs to, so ‘who’. Third, sentences you can flip so that either pronoun seems to fit, which one person warns the test cannot settle — the fix there, from one person, is to identify what the pronoun is doing inside its own clause rather than where it sits in the sentence, and from this page, to rewrite the sentence so the question is plain. Relative clauses — ‘the man who/whom I saw’ — are the place people asked about and left as a gap; the one person who addresses it says the choice depends on the pronoun’s job inside the clause it lives in (‘I saw him’, so whom), not on its position at the front. One person objects that the test takes too much thinking in the moment; another says it is not simple if you never learned what a subject is — which is why this page teaches the test and not the terms. And some people note that people whose first language marks its nouns for case handle who and whom more easily than English speakers, who absorbed the pair by ear and never saw the rule.

People argue this harder than they argue the test, and this page renders it as an open question below, because both sides have real numbers. Many people say the simplest strategy is never to use ‘whom’: ‘who’ is accepted in almost every position now, and a wrong ‘whom’ sounds worse than a wrong ‘who’ — some people call the wrong ‘whom’ hypercorrection, the sound of someone trying too hard, and one person warns the same. Some people say the distinction is fading out of the language on its own, and one person calls it the last remnant of the old English case system, and one person cites a major dictionary’s usage note — checked for this page — that ‘who’ in speech where ‘whom’ would be strictly correct is widely accepted. Against that, many people teach the test because they think it is worth knowing, and others say ‘whom’ remains expected in academic, legal and journalistic writing and is noticed when it is missing. People argue it back and forth; the resolution people themselves reach, in some of those arguments, is register — formal writing against speech — and in the rest it is personal preference. People argue, one person each way, whether ‘whom’ has vanished from newspapers and books; one answers that it is still pervasive in formal writing, and the argument is not settled. This page’s own position, stated as its own: in a cover letter, a report or anything a stranger will judge you by, use the test; in speech, and in a message to a friend, say ‘who’ and think no more about it.

In writing that will be read by someone who is judging you, and people name the places. Others say ‘whom’ is expected in academic writing, legal drafting and journalism; one person warns a ‘who’ where a ‘whom’ belongs will be noticed in formal writing by educated readers; one person says fixed phrases — ‘to whom it may concern’ — keep it alive on their own. One person who works in an office says ‘this is he’ and correct ‘whom’ are still normal among their colleagues, and another says they are used there mainly as a register marker — a way of sounding formal — rather than because anyone needs the case. Some people say that using ‘whom’ correctly and often in casual conversation is read as affectation, and people say the same of ‘so-and-so and I’ where ‘me’ belongs — the overcorrection is a marker of register, not of grammar. One person in legal drafting says there are shared-possessive constructions where no wording is graceful — and how to write a double possessive cleanly is a gap people named and left open. So the answer people give is a place, not a rule: the page, yes; the pub, no. People also draw one line inside speech, from a singleton: in speech the preposition falls more naturally at the end — ‘Who did you give it to?’ — than to front it — ‘To whom did you give it?’ — and the second, one person says, is the unnatural one in speech.

Because English threw the rule away everywhere except here, and then kept teaching a second rule that was never true. One person gives the history: Old English marked its nouns for case — a different ending for the doer and the done-to — and modern English dropped almost all of it; the pronouns are the last place the endings survive, which is why who and whom feel arbitrary while he and him feel obvious. You do not struggle with he and him because you heard them ten thousand times before anyone explained them; you struggle with whom because you did not. That is also why the test works — it routes the rare pair through the common one. The second rule is the one about prepositions. One person settles it: ‘never end a sentence with a preposition’ was never a rule of English — the same person traces it to teachers, not to the language — and the effort to obey it is what produces ‘to whom did you give it’ in a kitchen. You may end the sentence with ‘to’. You may say ‘who’. Some people say people learning English as a second language get this right more readily than native speakers, because their own language kept its cases and they know what the question is asking; native speakers, some people say, were never taught the rules and — some people add — are running on absorbed context, which is exactly what the he/him test gives back to you.