My wife has said a noticeable number of times: “What are you looking?”. I think this is interference from Korean, which uses the direct object marker 을/를 instead of a preposition. Maybe I just give a short answer, eg “My glasses”, or say “I am looking for my glasses”, or say “For. I am looking for my glasses”, depending on how much like an English teacher I feel at the time.
In this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus said to Mary Magdalene “For whom are you looking?”. This is not directly equivalent, because of the switch between what and who/whom. Google Ngrams shows that basically no-one says For what are you looking?.
With who/whom, there are four choices: Who are you looking for?, Whom are you looking for?, For whom are you looking? and For who are you looking? Google Ngrams shows usage in that order. Despite the ‘rule’ that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, W/who are you looking for? has always been more common, and must be regarded as normal, standard English. I was surprised to find that Whom are you looking for? is more common than For whom are you looking?. The former sound very awkward to me. If I had to be formal, I would say/write For whom are you looking?
Emmy Favilla, former copy chief of BuzzFeed, imagines A world without “whom”, but it’s not going to disappear as long as formal English is written or, less so, spoken. But its last holdout is definitely following a preposition. While Whom are you looking for? and For whom are you looking? are used less than Who are you looking for?, absolutely no-one says For who are you looking?
Other translations are used. The versions on Bible Gateway have:
Who are you looking for? 19
Whom are you looking for? 6
For whom are you looking? 4
Who is it you are looking for? 4
Who is it that you are looking for? 2
Whom seekest thou? 10
Whom are you seeking? 7
Whom do you seek? 3
Who is it that you’re seeking? 1
Whom dost thou seek? 1
Who are you looking for?, Whom are you looking for? and For whom are you looking? are used in the same order and about the same proportion as shown in the Google Ngram result.
Whom seekest thou? isn’t just formal – it’s now archaic, and is used only in the KJV and those influenced by it. Whom dost thou seek? is one step more modern, but still archaic. Overall, seek is more formal than look for – it gets paired with who only once, and that with a different sentence pattern. Google Ngrams shows that Who do you seek? is used far less than Whom do you seek?, while Who do you seek for? and For whom do you seek are not used at all.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 