Resume, Résumé, or Resumé? How to Spell It

Why the accent marks exist in the first place

The word comes from French. "Résumé" is the past participle of the French verb "résumer," meaning "to summarize" — which is exactly what the document does: it summarizes your experience. In French, the two acute accents (the little marks slanting up to the right over each "e") signal pronunciation, telling a reader to say "reh-zoo-MAY" rather than letting the e's go silent or flat. English borrowed the word along with its accents, the way it borrowed "café," "fiancé," and "cliché."

Over time, English speakers did to "résumé" what they do to most loanwords: they started dropping the accents for convenience, especially in casual and business writing where typing special characters is a small hassle. That is how the bare "resume" spelling became standard in American usage, and how the single-accent "resumé" (keeping only the final accent, since that is the one that most affects how an English speaker reads it) emerged as a middle ground. None of these is a corruption or an error — English routinely naturalizes borrowed words by shedding diacritics, and dictionaries have followed by listing all three forms as valid.

US business usage vs. traditional and international usage

In US business and professional writing, "resume" with no accents is overwhelmingly the most common spelling. It is what most American style guides treat as acceptable, what job boards use in their interfaces, and what the vast majority of US applicants type. If you are applying to American companies and want the lowest-friction, most conventional choice, plain "resume" is it — nobody will read it as a mistake, because it is the norm.

"Résumé" with both accents is the traditional and etymologically correct form, and it still carries a slightly more formal or polished feel. It is common in more formal prose, in academic and some European contexts, and among writers who prefer to honor the word's French origin. Using it signals care, and it is never wrong. The single-accent "resumé" is the least common of the three but is still dictionary-listed and accepted; some people choose it precisely because it nudges the pronunciation in the right direction without the full French styling.

A separate but related point: in much of the world outside North America, the document itself is more often called a "CV" (curriculum vitae) rather than a resume, and the word "resume" in any spelling is less central. Within the US and Canada, though, "resume" is the standard term, and the spelling question above is the one that actually comes up. If you are applying internationally, the bigger decision is usually "resume vs. CV," not which accents to use.

The file name and URL: always use plain "resume"

Here is where the choice has a small but real practical stake. When you name the file you upload, or create a URL for an online version, use plain "resume" with no accents — for example, "Jane-Smith-Resume.pdf." Accented characters (é) are non-ASCII, and while modern systems handle them most of the time, they can occasionally be mangled into garbage characters (the classic "é" mojibake) by older applicant-tracking systems, email clients, download handlers, or file systems. A file named "Résumé.pdf" can in rare cases arrive on a recruiter's side as "Re%CC%81sume%CC%81.pdf" or worse. Plain ASCII never has that problem.

The same logic applies to email subject lines, URLs, and any field a machine parses rather than a human reads. The safe, universal default for all of these is the unaccented "resume." This is not about which spelling is "correct" — it is about avoiding a needless encoding glitch at the exact moment your application is being filed. Inside the document, on the visible page a human reads, you can use whichever spelling you prefer; the no-accents rule is specifically for the machine-readable wrappers around it.

For the headline or section label inside the document, you do not even need the word "resume" at all — many strong resumes lead with your name as the heading rather than the literal word "Resume," which saves a line and looks more modern. If you do include it as a title or in a tagline, any of the three spellings is fine on the page itself; just keep it consistent with how you spell it elsewhere in the document and in your cover letter.

Will accents trip up an ATS?

Applicant-tracking systems parse the text of your document, and the word "resume" in your visible content is rarely a keyword recruiters search on anyway — they search for skills, titles, and tools. So an accented "résumé" in your body text is very unlikely to cause a parsing problem on its own; modern ATS platforms handle Unicode text fine. The real ATS risk from special characters comes from things like fancy bullet glyphs, ligatures, and text embedded in images or text boxes, not from a couple of acute accents on the word "résumé."

That said, the cautious, zero-downside move is to keep the machine-facing surfaces plain: an ASCII file name, a clean simple layout, and standard fonts. Do that, and the accents-versus-no-accents question becomes purely cosmetic — a matter of taste in your visible text, with no effect on whether the system can read your application. If you want to be completely safe and not think about it, use unaccented "resume" everywhere; you lose nothing by doing so, since it is also the most common spelling.

So how should you spell it?

All three spellings — resume, résumé, and resumé — are correct, so there is no wrong answer and no spelling that will cost you an interview on its own. For US business writing, the most common and lowest-friction choice is plain "resume" with no accents; for a more traditional, formal feel, "résumé" with both accents is the etymologically correct form and is always acceptable. The single-accent "resumé" is a valid middle ground but the least common.

The two rules worth remembering: use plain ASCII "resume" for your file name, URL, and email subject — the machine-readable wrappers — so accented characters never get garbled in an older system; and be consistent with whichever spelling you pick everywhere a human reads it. Get those two right and the rest is taste. Recruiters and applicant-tracking systems judge the substance of the document, not whether you put accents over the e's — so settle the spelling in ten seconds and put your effort into the experience and results on the page.