Who’s v Whose

Every now and again, a good copywriter has to question their grammatical knowledge. We all do. Particularly in this age of spell checks and grammar tools on Word etc. It’s so easy to get a bit stale or question whether you are actually right in your opinion – especially when challenged by an account man (thanks Howard!). So here’s what I brushed up on this week:

Who’s is a contraction of who is and who has.

As a rule, look at the sentence you’re constructing and work out whether ‘who is’ or ‘who has’ is correct. If not, you might be better with ‘whose’, e.g.

“As somebody who’s never been kissed…”

Although less common these days, this means ‘who has’ in this case, so a contracted ‘who’s’ is correct.

Whose is a possessive form meaning ‘of whom’ or ‘belonging to whom’.

It’s also often used with inanimate objects, e.g.

The book, whose jacket had a picture of a pony on it, was dated from the 1950s.

Or

Whose books are these?