How major style guides rule on "résumé"
AP strips accents; academic and Chicago style retain them to disambiguate from the verb 'resume'.
The disagreement on "résumé" is an example of whether to retain accents from source languages, the category of style-guide differences that most often confuses copy editors and creates inconsistency across long documents. Below is a guide-by-guide breakdown, drawn directly from the published editions cited.
| Style guide | Preferred form |
|---|---|
| AP Stylebook (2024–2025 Edition) | resume |
| Chicago Manual of Style | résumé |
| MLA Handbook | résumé |
| APA Publication Manual | résumé |
| Merriam-Webster Dictionary | résumé (also resume, resumé) |
What the divergence actually means
Unlike many compound-modernization decisions where style guides eventually converge, "résumé" continues to show genuine divergence between major guides. The AP Stylebook treats this as a settled call; Chicago Manual leaves more flexibility; and Merriam-Webster, as a descriptive dictionary, records both forms. Source: Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition
The APA Publication Manual diverges here: it specifies "résumé" as the form preferred for academic writing in psychology and behavioral-science journals. APA's reasoning typically tracks scientific publishing conventions rather than newspaper-style economy. Source: APA Publication Manual, 7th Edition
Merriam-Webster lists "résumé (also resume, resumé)", which serves as the lexicographic baseline for U.S. style decisions. Because Merriam-Webster's entries reflect aggregated published usage rather than editorial preference, when a guide says "follow Merriam-Webster", as APA does, that effectively delegates the call to whichever spelling has dominated the published corpus. Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Garner's Modern English Usage classifies the "résumé" / "resume" pair on its Language-Change Index, a five-stage scale measuring whether a once-disputed form has been accepted into Standard English. For whether to retain accents from source languages, Garner's typically rates the dominant form at Stage 4 ("ubiquitous but objected to by traditionalists") or Stage 5 ("fully accepted"). Source: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition
Practical guidance for editors
For working writers, the practical rule is straightforward: in journalism, follow AP; in academic writing in the humanities, follow MLA or Chicago; in social-science publishing, follow APA; in book publishing, follow Chicago. When no house style applies, Merriam-Webster's main entry is the safest default. The differences across these guides on "résumé" reflect not disagreement about correctness but different audiences and editorial pressures.
Editorial context
Google Books Ngrams data for American English pinpoint the crossover where "resume" overtook "résumé" in printed books around the late 1970s, illustrating how everyday publishing favored simplified spellings amid the transition from typesetting to digital word processing. This empirical shift underscores a disconnect from prescriptive retention in scholarly contexts, as accentless forms proliferated in job listings, newspapers, and trade books where diacritics seemed extraneous. A typical instance appears in E-mail your resume and cover letter to careers@firm.com by EOW, the phrasing dominant in corpora reflecting real-world recruitment documents. Such evidence highlights why "résumé" lingers mainly in formal prose demanding noun-verb clarity, like legal briefs or academic bios, even as raw frequency tilts decisively toward the plainer variant in broader corpora through the present day.
Cross-references
For the dictionary entry, frequency data, and pronunciation of résumé, see the main word page. For other style-guide spelling decisions in this category, browse all style-guide spelling rulings.