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Whose

From Teflpedia

Whose (/hu:z/) is an English wh- pronoun (a type of wh- word).

Meaning[edit | edit source]

Whose relates to possession, particularly by people, though it is not restricted to this sense.

  • Whose is this?
  • Whose are those?
  • Whose car is it?
  • He is a man whose principles are lacking.

Form[edit | edit source]

Whose is the genitive case form of who, what and which; so it indicates possession. The possessive 's suffix gets suffixed.

Grammatically, it can act either as an interrogative pronoun or a relative pronoun. Syntactically, whose can act as either an independent pronoun or as a dependent pronoun (i.e. a type of determiner). As a relative pronoun it is the only dependent relative possessive pronoun in English.

Interrogative pronoun:

Whose bike is this?

Relative pronoun:

The man, whose car had broken down, was angry.
She was the woman whose dog was loose.

Pronunciation[edit | edit source]

Like who, ⟨wh⟩ here is pronounced with a h phoneme /h/.

Spelling[edit | edit source]

This needs to be learnt as a sightword.

A common spelling/grammar error is to spell this as ⟨who’s⟩.[1] This is similar to how people commonly misspell its as ⟨it’s⟩.

References[edit | edit source]