Other forms: prawns
A prawn is a small curved shellfish that turns pink when cooked. Peel the prawns, a prawn cocktail, king prawns.
The colour change happens because heat frees a red pigment that was bound up in a protein while the animal was alive. Prawn and shrimp are used differently on either side of the Atlantic and the line between them is not a biological one.
1nounprawnA small curved shellfish that turns pink when cooked.
“We ordered a plate of grilled prawns with garlic and lemon.”
prawn is a shellfish.
Middle English prayne, of unknown origin, with no clear relatives in other languages.
First attested early 1400s as various Middle English - forms prayne, prane, praune, and prawne, which present no clear cognates in languages other than English. The forms suggest a hypothetical Old English - form prægn, where æg would have evolved into Middle English ay, but it is unclear if the word is of Germanic origin, from another European language, or loaned from a qfa-sub -. In the Isle of Wight, a word prankle ("prawn") is recorded and thought to be related. Century, following Skeat, suggested transposition of an unrecorded Old French parne, perne related to Spanish perna* (“a flat shellfish”), Old Italian perna and diminutive pernochie, parnocchie, glossed as "shrimps or prawne, fishes" by John Florio, but the OED considers Florio's entry incorrect and the suggested connection semantically and phonologically implausible. butterface ("woman with attractive body and unattractive face") is from the idea of discarding the head of a prawn before eating it.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA