who
People say "who" when they want to know the identity of a person. They ask "who is that?" or "who did this?" to get a name, a role, or a story about someone.
What a model may hear
- identity lookup system administration
- run a command to list logged-in users on a Unix or Linux machine
- WHOIS query networking and domain registration
- look up domain ownership records in a public database
- World Health Organization global health and news
- treat the word as the agency's acronym and pull health data or advisories
- relative pronoun linguistics and query languages
- parse it as a grammatical marker or a database join condition in SQL-like constructions
Where people and models part ways
“who runs this site”
Meant: tell me the name of the person or company in charge
May be taken as: run a WHOIS lookup on the domain and return raw registration fields
Say instead: “what person or company owns and operates this website”
“who is online”
Meant: which of my friends are active right now
May be taken as: execute the Unix who command and list system user sessions
Say instead: “which of my contacts are currently active or available”
“who said that”
Meant: identify the speaker in a conversation or quote
May be taken as: search for the World Health Organization as the source of a statement
Say instead: “which person or source is responsible for this quote or statement”
Tips
- Add 'person' or 'people' to steer away from system commands.
- Specify 'domain owner' if you want WHOIS data, 'logged-in users' if you want system output.
- Avoid bare 'who' in technical contexts; say 'which user' or 'what organization'.
- If you mean the health agency, say 'WHO' in all caps or spell it out.
- In database questions, say 'which records' instead of 'who' to avoid SQL parsing.
Often confused with
- whom
- formal grammar variant, rarely used in speech
- whose
- asks about possession, not identity
- which
- used for things or animals, not people
- whoami
- a specific Unix command returning the current username
- w
- a related Unix command showing more detail than who