Meaning
The very best of a group; the choicest individuals or finest examples of something. It intensifies the long-standing metaphor of cream as the richest, best part of anything. The register is lightly humorous and often ironic, and the accents are commonly dropped in casual writing. Playful to ironic; accents are routinely dropped, and it can salute an elite or mock a disappointing selection. Regional use: General English (borrowed from French).
Origin
French for 'cream of the cream', doubling the older metaphor in which cream, the richest layer skimmed from milk, stands for the best part of anything (compare the native English 'cream of the crop'). Merriam-Webster dates the first known use in English to 1848, and Dictionary.com records the borrowing between 1840 and 1850, making it a mid-19th-century import. No individual populariser is documented; the phrase arrived with the wave of fashionable French expressions for society and taste in that period and became naturalised enough to shed its accents and italics in everyday use, though its class-conscious tone keeps it prone to irony.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- creme de la cremes
- cremes de la creme
Usage Examples
- Recruiters promise applicants the crème de la crème of graduate placements.
- The festival presents itself as the crème de la crème of independent cinema.
- Only the crème de la crème of each season's harvest goes into their olive oil.