Other forms: creams, creamed
Cream is the thick, rich, fatty part of milk — the part that rises to the top and gets poured over pudding. A jug of it beside the apple crumble, a swirl on hot chocolate, a layer whipped stiff between the halves of a sponge cake.
It is also a colour: a soft off-white with warmth in it, the colour of cream walls and a cream linen suit. Then there are the creams that never came near a cow — hand cream, sun cream, antiseptic cream — thick, spreadable and sold in tubes. Figuratively, the cream of something is its best part. There is a verb too: cream the butter and sugar means beat them until pale and smooth. Watch the countability. The dairy kind is uncountable — some cream, a drop of cream, never a cream — but the tube kind counts: a cream for eczema, two creams on the shelf.
1nouncreamThe thick fatty part of milk, used on desserts and in cooking.~89%
“She poured cream over the crumble until the bowl started to float.”
2adjectivecolourOf a pale yellowish-white colour.~2%
“The kitchen was painted cream, which showed every mark.”
3nounsoftA thick soft substance rubbed into the skin.~5%
“The doctor gave him a cream for the rash on his hands.”
4nounbestThe best part of a group of people or things.~2%
“The scheme takes the cream of each year's graduates.”
5verbbeatTo beat butter and sugar together until smooth and pale.~2%
“Cream the butter and sugar before you add the eggs.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Cream is two Latin words that got tangled together. Old French creme blended chrisma, an ointment borrowed from Ancient Greek khrisma, with crāmum, a Latin word for cream that came in from Gaulish. The ointment half is why so many things you rub into your skin are still called creams. Between them they pushed out the native English word for the stuff, Old English rēam.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰrey-
Middle English
creme
English, today
cream
From Middle English creme. From Middle English creime, creme, from Old French creme, cresme, blend of Latin chrisma (“ointment”) (from Ancient Greek χρῖσμα (“unguent”)), and Latin crāmum (“cream”), from cel-gau crama (compare Welsh cramen (“scab, skin”), Breton crammen), from Proto-Indo-European (s)krama- (compare mga screm (“surface, skin”), Dutch schram (“abrasion”), Lithuanian kramas (“scurf”)). a doublet of crema and crème. Displaced native Old English rēam (“cream”) (> modern ream). Figurative sense of "most excellent element or part" appears from 1581. Verb meaning "to beat, thrash, wreck" is 1929, U.S. colloquial. The U.S. standard of identity is from [http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2002/aprqtr/21cfr131.3.htm 21 CFR 131.3(a)].
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA