Creamy means thick, smooth and rich the way cream is. A soup blended until no lump is left, a risotto that pours slowly off the spoon, the middle of a good cheesecake.
Creamy describes what a thing feels like in your mouth, not what went into it, so a creamy sauce can hold no cream at all — hummus is creamy, and so is porridge cooked long enough. It works away from food as well: a creamy lather, creamy paint that leaves no streaks. It also names a colour, the soft yellow-white of cream, as in creamy walls or creamy petals. In coffee talk, creamy praises the texture, while milky only says that milk went in.
1adjectivecreamyThick and smooth in texture, like cream.~49%
“Beat the butter and sugar until the mixture is pale and creamy.”
Patterncreamy + noun (sauce, texture, soup) · rich and creamy · creaminess · cream
2adjectivecontainingContaining cream, or tasting of it.~2%
“A creamy mushroom sauce came with the chicken.”
3adjectivesoftOf the soft yellowish-white colour of cream.~49%
“The walls were a creamy off-white that warmed up in the evening light.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
CREAMy → thick like CREAM
It is cream + y: smooth and thick, like the top of fresh milk on a spoon.
hooks ontocream
Creamy is Middle English cremy: cream with -y stuck on the end, the same ending that turns dust into dusty and salt into salty. The word has never changed job. Everything worth knowing about it belongs to cream.
Middle English
cremy
English, today
creamy
From Middle English cremy, equivalent to cream + -y. cremey.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA