quién

Quien is a Spanish interrogative and relative pronoun used to refer to people. In interrogative and exclamative contexts it is written with an accent as quién or quiénes, signaling direct or indirect questions such as ¿Quién llamó? or ¿Quiénes vienen? It is also used in exclamations like ¡Quién lo diría!

As a relative pronoun, quien (without an accent) links a clause to a preceding noun and refers to a person mentioned earlier. It agrees in number to the antecedent: quien for singular, quienes for plural. Quien is often used after prepositions, forming phrases such as con quien, para quien, and ante quien. In non-restrictive or non-essential clauses, quien is frequently set off by commas: la poeta, quien ganó el premio, dio una charla.

Quien contrasts with qué and cuál, which refer to things or choices rather than people. It specifically targets persons and is commonly used in questions about identity or in clauses that identify who performed an action. For referring to a person as the object of a preposition, quien functions in the same way as a typical relative pronoun, while the accent-marked quién is reserved for interrogative or exclamative uses.

Etymologically, quién derives from the Latin quis (who), and its spelling has been stabilized in modern Spanish to distinguish interrogative uses from the non-accented relative pronoun. Related forms include quiénes (plural) and the compound prepositional forms con/quien, para/quien, entre/quien, among others.