“Creme de la creme” means “the best of the best” and comes from French. It originally referred to the skimming of cream in agriculture, and is now a superlative phrase used to describe superior items. It has been adopted as a name for specific design elements and retail items, but has given way to less fanciful ways of describing superior items. Other phrases used include “the bomb” and “highest quality”. An anglicized version of the phrase is “cream of the crop”.
The idiomatic phrase “creme de la creme” in English means “the best of the best”. Other ways to describe this idiom include single adjectives like “superior” and “premier.” In some other uses of this phrase, it can refer to a group of people with high social standing.
Most word historians agree that the phrase “creme de la creme” comes directly from the French language. In fact, the words in the sentence are written in French, and while modern English speakers recognize the sentence as part of familiar English usage, it is still written as a set of French words.
Originally, the meaning of the phrase “creme de la creme” comes from the idea that dairy products can separate different grades of cream by skimming the fattest or thickest items off the top of the cream as it settles. This physical task in agriculture has led to the abstraction of the phrase “creme de la creme”, literally “cream of the cream”, to speak of anything that has been carefully selected to be superior to another comparable item.
Linguistic experts describe the phrase “creme de la creme” as a superlative phrase. Superlatives are words like better, bigger, and faster that compare or contrast more than two things. Here, the phrase “creme de la creme” could effectively be called a double superlative, where the best of an item is carefully selected to provide an even better result.
In modern times, this phrase has been adopted as the name of specific design elements and other retail items. However, it does enjoy a popular use in the English idiom canon, where someone who is trying to describe the best of something may call it the creme de la creme. The phrase has generally given way to less fanciful ways to describe a staple item or more desired commodity. For example, some modern English slang like “the bomb” or “tops” do the same job. Other English speakers may use a vernacular misnomer such as “the bestest” or “the most awesomest” to refer to a better choice.
English speakers may also use more technical language to refer to items rather than using the phrase “creme de la creme.” One way to do this is to identify the actual main benefit of something. For example, rather than using a general idiom, a small business owner evaluating organic products might say “this fruit is the most natural product” rather than counter it in a generic way. Others might use phrases like “highest quality” or “very well produced.” There is also an anglicized version of the idiom, with an identical meaning, in the form of “cream of the crop”.
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