Tom’s Fun with Words – Who’s Shooting Whom?

The pronouns Who and whom are about grammatical roles, not importance, and their distinction mostly matters in formal writing. Who is used when the person is doing the action in the sentence. Whom is used when the person is receiving the action. A simple way to remember this is that the shooter is who, and the target is whom. In the sentence “Who is shooting whom?” who refers to the person pulling the trigger, and whom refers to the person being shot.

Think of it this way:
Who = shooter
Whom = target

If that still feels unclear, rephrase the sentence as a statement and substitute pronouns. He is shooting him. If he fits, use who. If him fits, use whom. The same person can be who in one sentence and whom in another, depending entirely on whether he is doing the action or receiving it.

Historically, who and whom come from the same Old English root, hwā (pronounced hwah), meaning “what person.” Early English, like Latin and German, marked grammatical case much more clearly than modern English does. Over time, that single root developed different forms based on sentence function. Who emerged as the subject form, and whom as the object form. They were never competing words, just two versions of the same word doing different jobs.

They feel confusing today because English gradually lost most of its case endings. Nouns stopped changing form, and word order took over most of the grammatical work. For example, “Who shot who?” works perfectly well in casual conversation because word order alone tells us who is the shooter and who is the target. But no author would be found dead using “Who shot who?” in narrative prose unless it was safely tucked inside quotation marks.

Another example:

Formal: The man whom you called left a message.

Informal Common: The man you called left a message.

Informal Uncommon: The man who you called left a message.

Personal pronouns are the exception where English still preserves clear subject and object forms. We continue to say he/him, she/her, and they/them without thinking about it. Who/whom stands out because they belong to a different class of pronouns, interrogative and relative, and sound formal and interchangeable in speech. They’re simply examples of the last visible traces of an older, more precise system still hanging on.