How do you spell resume? The three forms
You will see the word written three ways. Résumé is the original form, borrowed from French, with an accent on both e letters. Resume is the same word without accents, and it is what most people type. Resumé, with only the final accent, appears often in emails and posts but is listed by some dictionaries as a less common variant; avoid it, because readers take it for a half-finished accent. The plural is résumés or resumes.
Resume without accents has a second life as a verb: to resume work means to start again after a break, and it is pronounced differently. The accents on the noun were a way to tell the two apart in writing, which is the main reason some writers keep them.
Resume spelling in the US: which form to use
On a US application, both spellings are accepted and neither is an error. A reader who sees résumé will take it as careful and formal; a reader who sees resume will not notice anything at all. What counts is consistency. If you write résumé in your email, write it the same way in your cover letter; if you write resume, use that everywhere. Mixed forms in one document look like an oversight.
A practical rule: use the plain resume spelling unless the employer or the style of the field uses the accent. It needs no special keys, it survives every email program and form, and it will never display as a stray symbol.
Does resume have an accent?
Yes, in its fully accented form it has two: both e letters take an acute accent, the mark that slants up to the right. That is why the form with a single accent, resumé, is not standard. If you do want the accents, the resume spelling with accents is résumé, with a mark on the first e and the last, and it is written the same in the plural, résumés.
How to type resume with accent marks
Accent marks are produced by a key combination, so you do not need to copy and paste them. For the letter é:
| Where you type | How to get é |
|---|---|
| Mac | Hold Option and press E, release both, then press E again |
| Windows (numeric keypad) | Hold Alt and type 0233 on the number pad, then release Alt |
| Windows (US-International keyboard) | Press the apostrophe key, then E |
| Microsoft Word | Press Ctrl and the apostrophe key together, release, then press E |
| iPhone and Android | Press and hold the E key, then slide to é |
| Google Docs | Insert, then Special characters, and search for e acute; or use the system shortcut above |
If a key combination does not work on your keyboard, copy the word from this page, but check the result after pasting; a pasted accent can sometimes bring different formatting with it.
Accents, software and file names
Employers use software to store and search applications, and a search for the plain word may not find the accented word in every system, and the other way round. Nobody searches resumes for the word resume, so this rarely matters inside the document itself, but it is worth keeping the plain form in two places. Name your file with plain letters and no accents, for example First-Last-Resume.pdf, because file names pass through email and upload forms that handle special characters unevenly. And do not title the document with the word at all: your name belongs at the top, not a heading that says Resume. The ATS guide explains how the software reads the rest of the file, and the ATS resume checker will flag a file that does not read cleanly.
Outside North America, many employers ask for a CV, and the accent question does not come up; the CV and resume comparison explains the difference. For the rest of the document, the guide to writing a professional resume takes you from the job ad to the finished file.
Sources
Checked on 12 October 2026.