English homophones
who's/whos/whose
"whos" is a noun; "whose" is a determiner - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "whos" arrives as a noun, while "whose" is a determiner. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "who" then splits - "who's" (5 letters) vs "whos" (4).
- Shared stem "who" then splits - "who's" (5 letters) vs "whose" (5).
- Shared stem "whos" then splits - "whos" (4 letters) vs "whose" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across who's, whos, whose: hosw. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
who's
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVC
Inventory hosw · no private letters vs siblings
whos
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVC
Inventory hosw · no private letters vs siblings
whose
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCV
Inventory ehosw · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "who's" when you mean: Who is.
- Write "whos" when you mean: plural of who; often used along with whats, whys, hows, etc.
- Write "whose" when you mean: Of whom, belonging to whom; which person's or people's.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 3-spelling cluster (who's, whos, whose). Here's where to go from here.
- "whose" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #919 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: white · wight · yt. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.