At least in the UK - and probably other countries in the Commonwealth - we almost exclusively say "CV" ("curriculum vitae", literally "course of [my] life"). "Résumé" is not well-understood here.

I'm also from the UK, and although I'm part of the "we" who normally use the term CV, due to the incredible pervasiveness of USA culture, I (and probably most of the people I know) am perfectly aware of what a résumé is. I just never expected to see it spelled "resume".

I mean, résumé and resume have the same French root, but in English - even American English as far as I can tell - they're totally different words! Even the pronounciation is completely different. So why would someone spell résumé as resume, especially in the name/title of a project about them?

How is that going to do anything except cause confusion?

Non-English loanwords enter the English language by a process of naturalization, [...] there is a tendency for accents and other diacritics that were present in the donor language to be dropped [1].

We have words with the same spelling but different meanings and pronunciations all the time - so called Heteronyms [2]. Doesn't seem that confusing to me. To me it'd be pretty weird if people who understood the word rôle were baffled by the word role.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

"Doesn't seem that confusing to me."

Really? I've always thought of heteronyms as one of the most stand-out features of English that exemplify its confusing inconsistency. More so than the homophones, because it's harder to think of the "other" meanings if you've got the wrong pronunciation in your head.

In reference to the passage you quoted about diacritics, if only you had read as far as the next-but-one paragraph, you might have noticed: "Words that retain their accents often do so to help indicate pronunciation (e.g. frappé, naïve, soufflé), or to help distinguish them from an unaccented English word (e.g. exposé, résumé, rosé)."

Plenty of non-commonwealth countries use "CV". e.g. Ireland.

US uses it as well, but only for academia.

Even us French use C.V., not résumé...

Résumé, resume, and resumé are all accepted spellings in American English. As noted by others, many countries use the term C.V., which is likely to be a larger source of confusion for people.

Part of this is likely that many Americans do not have an easy way to type the accented 'e' character. (Short of copy/paste, I'm not even sure how I'd do it. Friends who have Macs have it easy.)

There's also the (lower these days, thankfully) risk of half-baked tools other people use proudly presenting your résumé.