The Etymology of Cream
Cream has one of the strangest etymologies in everyday English: it is a blend of two completely unrelated source words that converged in early medieval French. One source is Late Latin chrisma, from Greek khrisma — the consecrated oil used in baptism and anointing, from the verb khriein (to anoint). This is the same root that gives English Christ (the anointed one) and chrism. The other source is cramum, a Gaulish (Celtic) word that Late Latin borrowed for the skim or fatty top of milk. In Old French, the two words pulled together into cresme, which carried both senses — sacred oil and dairy cream — for centuries. English borrowed the word around 1300 in the dairy sense only, while Church Latin kept chrisma for the religious meaning, giving English the separate word chrism. So cream and Christ are distant linguistic cousins. Modern French still spells the dairy form as crème. The figurative cream of the crop — the best part — preserves the old idea of cream as the richest top layer.