Curriculum vitae
summary of career
In English, a curriculum vitae (English: , Latin for "course of life"), commonly known as CV, is a short written summary of a person's career, qualifications, and education. This is the most common usage in British English. In North America, the term résumé (also spelled resume) is used, referring to a short career summary, whereas CVs are much longer than resumes.
The term curriculum vitae and its abbreviation, CV, are also used especially in academia to refer to extensive or even complete summaries of a person's career, qualifications, and education, including publications and other information. This has caused the widespread misconception that it is incorrect to refer to short CVs as CVs in American English and that short CVs should be called résumés, but this is not supported by the usage recorded in American dictionaries. For example, the University of California, Davis notes that "[i]n the United States and Canada, CV and resume are sometimes used interchangeably" while describing the common distinction made in North-American academia between the use of these terms to refer to documents with different contents and lengths.
In many countries, a short CV is typically the first information that a potential employer receives from a job-seeker, and CVs are typically used to screen applicants, often followed by an interview. CVs may also be requested for applicants to postsecondary programs, scholarships, grants, and bursaries. In the 2010s, it became popular for applicants to provide an electronic version of their CV to employers by email, through an employment website, or published on a job-oriented social-networking service such as LinkedIn.
In the United States, both a CV and resume represent experiences and skills and are used in application processes, but they serve different purposes.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Curriculum vitae” as summary of career. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q186649. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Curriculum vitae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.