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What is the difference between shrimp and prawn?
Does it refer to different species of creature, to usage (for example, one as the animal itself versus the other as the meat of that same animal), to language level or region or register, or to something else altogether?
As an English person, we use the terms to describe the size. Shrimp being small and Prawn being large.
However according to experts the terms can be interchangeable for example:
"The terms shrimp and prawn have no definite reference to any known taxonomic groups. Although the term shrimp is sometimes applied to smaller species, while prawn is more often used for larger forms, there is no clear distinction between both terms and their usage is often confused or even reverse in different countries or regions."
Source: ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/009/w7192e/w7192e13.pdf
According to the linguist Anatoly Liberman:
"No Germanic language associates the shrimp with its size"
Source: http://blog.oup.com/2012/05/word-origin-prawn/
However the exact definition in most dictionaries seem to be a large shrimp.
Examples:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prawn http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/prawn
See wikipedia, I did :)
In my region (American Northeast), "shrimp" is the only commonly-used term for those crustaceans. I had actually never heard the word "prawn" until I was an adult. Wikipedia asserts that there is no scientific distinction associated with the names.
define shrimp], [define prawn]