Meaning
The very best members of a group or the finest examples of a kind, whether people, goods, or produce. The phrase singles out an elite subset from the general run and implies everything else ranks below it; it is complimentary rather than sneering. Neutral to complimentary, and slightly folksy when applied to literal harvests or livestock. The French form creme de la creme is a separate borrowed phrase best kept for its own contexts. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The metaphor rests on real dairy practice: cream, the richest part of milk, rises to the top, so the top layer is the best. English writers were using cream figuratively early - John Ray's 1678 proverb collection preserves 'the cream of the jest' - and the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms says the crop version was adopted for its alliterative appeal. The French 'creme de la creme', literally cream of the cream, is first attested in a literal dairy sense in Paris's Journal Oeconomique of October 1759; strikingly, its figurative sense shows up in English print before French. London's Courier used it on 25 February 1839, quoting a pamphlet that credited the fashionable term to Frances Trollope; the Washington Army and Navy Chronicle used it ironically in 1840, British papers followed in 1841-42, and figurative French uses arrive only in 1843. An anglicised 'cream de la cream' appears in the Nottinghamshire Guardian of 11 February 1870, applied to kitchen-garden vegetables. Honest gap: none of these references supplies a dated first use of the exact wording 'cream of the crop', so its rise in the later nineteenth century is inferred rather than pinned.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cream of the cream
- the cream of the crop of society
Usage Examples
- Only the cream of the crop reached the final round of auditions at the drama school this year.
- The scholarship committee looks for the cream of the crop, so you will need grades well above average.
- These preserves are the cream of the crop, made from fruit picked at the peak of the season.