English

Alternative forms

• resume, resumé

Noun

résumé ‎(plural résumés)

1. A summary or synopsis. [from 18th c.]
   • 1919, Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), ‘Excepting Mrs. Pentherby’, The Toys of Peace:

     On one occasion Mrs. Val Gwepton, who was not blessed with the most reposeful of temperaments, fairly let herself go, and gave Mrs. Pentherby a vivid and truthful résumé of her opinion of her.

   • 1978, Royal Society of South Australia, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, Volumes 102-103, page 79,

     A résumé of diagnostic characters of the five families represented in Australia is also given, and a list of the 19 genera described from Australia is included

   • 1999, The Guardian, 14 Jun 1999:

     However, a brief résumé of recent weddings, royal and otherwise, reveals that Edward and Sophie's big day could be in danger of being badly out of step.

2. (chiefly Canada, US, Australia) A curriculum vitae; an account of one’s employment history and qualifications (often for presentation to a potential future employer when applying for a job). [from 20th c.]
   • 2005, Tony Martin, Lolly Scramble: A Memoir of Little Consequence, Pan Macmillan Australia, unnumbered page,

     It was this piffling résumé that accompanied me to Auckland, where I hoped to get a foot in with the city′s biggest ‘nonprofessional’ theatre group, the New Independent.

   • 2006, Helen Borger, Human Resources, Career FAQs, Australia, page 122,

     Résumés have a particular structure that you should follow – it′s what you say in it that makes yours stand out from the rest.

   • 2011, Monica Makari, How to Find a Job in Australia, Revised edition, How to...Books, Australia, page 34,

     A well written CV (Curriculum Vitae) or résumé is the most important document when looking for a job, your first opportunity to present yourself and it can open or close the door to an interview.

   • 2012 May 20, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “Marge Gets A Job” (season 4, episode 7; originally aired 11/05/1992)”, in The Onion AV Club:

     Fortuitously, Marge is looking for a job after an endless hiatus from the working world. After Lisa helps her mother “polish” up her résumé so that she now appears to be the most accomplished woman in the world, Marge lands a job at the power plant operating a machine her ridiculously padded résumé claims she helped invent.

   • 1995, Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu", Wired Magazine

     The match between Stiegler and Xanadu was doubly unlikely; not only was Stiegler happily unemployed, but the Xanadu programmers did not seem to place high value on management personnel. As Stiegler tells it, the original plan during the first days at Autodesk was to get somebody with a good résumé and stick him in a closet until somebody from Autodesk came to visit, at which point the obedient manager could be trotted out to prove that the hackers were under control. This was hardly Stiegler's style.

Synonyms

• (account of education and employment): curriculum vitae, CV
• (summary or synopsis): précis

Usage notes

• In Canada, resumé is the sole spelling given by the Canadian Oxford Dictionary; résumé is the only spelling given by the Gage Canadian Dictionary (1997 edition).
• In the US, there are three major spellings of this word: résumé, resumé, and resume. All three are in common usage and all three are occasionally contested. The usual justification for each is usually as follows:
  • resume is an acceptable spelling, because modern English does not usually have diacritic marks except when borrowing terms or as an optional spelling to indicate a breach of standard pronunciation rules. Compare cafe, emigre, nee, and fiance, all of which are commonly spelled with and without accent marks. The spelling resume is more likely to be found on the web due to the limits of ASCII character encoding and the US English keyboard.
  • resumé follows a practice wherein a final e is accented to indicate that it is pronounced where it would usually remain silent. Compare touché, café, and especially saké and maté, where there is no etymological precedent for the accent. The acute accent over the first e, on the other hand, serves no function in English.
  • résumé follows a practice of retaining accents in borrowed words, which some may consider affected. Compare protégé, émigré, née, and élan.
• Certain other French words with two accented e's have the same usage conflict, though the relative infrequency of the words in common usage causes the conflict to be less pronounced. Also, some spell-checking tools prescribe against resumé, suggesting résumé instead, which may affect the perception of the correctness of the two spellings of the term.

Translations

Quotations

• For usage examples of this term, see Citations:résumé.

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ʁe.zy.me/

Verb

résumé m ‎(feminine singular résumée, masculine plural résumés, feminine plural résumées)

1. past participle of résumer

Noun

résumé m ‎(plural résumés)

1. summary, résumé
2. abstract (of an academic paper)

Derived terms

• en résumé

Anagrams

• mesure, mesuré
• meures
• remues, remués