Grammar for Geeks: That vs. Which
People that know far more about the subject of that vs. which will tell you that it
doesn't matter for most writing. The distinction is too fine to matter
when the other choice may sound better. However, as a geek, your choice
of words tend to matter a great deal when discussing technical details.
A noteworthy exception is when witing about people. For people
use "who" or "whom".
Back to that vs. which. Here's the bottom line:
- 'That' is restrictive
- 'Which' is not restrictive
For example:
| Word |
Example |
| that |
The most important data structure that is used in foo.c is a hash table |
| which |
The high performance data structure used, which is called a trie,
accounts for most of the performance improvement in the new version.
|
Simple way to tell which one to use? Imagine a "by the way" following
every which. If the sentence still makes sense, you're using the right
word.
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Last updated:
Sat Jul 31 10:47:16 PDT 2004