What's the difference between prawns and shrimp?

Question

are they the same thing with different names? or do people on the east coast call shrimp 'prawns' and people on the west coast call prawns 'shrimp'? are they from the same family? Prawns always seem to be bigger and have a fileted tail, or is that shrimp?

Answer 1

Alan Davidson in his "Oxford Companion to Food" (Oxford Press, 1999) says these words are examples of English usage differences between North Americans and the British. What Brits call prawns, he says, Americans call shrimps. To further confuse, is the word scampi, which simply means shrimp in Italian. Through U.S. monolingual ignorance, it's come to mean a specific dish with butter and garlic. You can imagine how Italians laugh when they see "Shrimp Scampi" on a menu.

Sometimes menu writers want to make stuff sound fancier. Do prawns sound more la-dee-dah than shrimp? I'm not sure -- but the word does make them sound bigger. And that's important, considering the price restaurateurs must charge for these popular crustaceans. They've gotten even more popular worldwide since shrimp farming methods have improved and distribution has widened. In places like Bangladesh or Ecuador, mangrove forests are bulldozed, with profound environmental and social impact, to satisfy humans' burgeoning hunger for jumbo shrimp.

Better Living Through Chemistry Department factoid: Shrimp farmers feed their livestock a laxative to minimize the size of the gut (or vein) that must be removed from all but the smallest species. Too much information? Sorry.

Answer 2

Prawns And Shrimp

Answer 3

Australians and the English call shrimps prawns

Answer 4

Prawns are crustaceans, belonging to the sub-order Dendrobranchiata. They are similar in appearance to shrimp, but can be distinguished by the gill structure which is branching in prawns but is lamellar in shrimp. The sister taxon to Dendrobranchiata is Pleocyemata, which contains all the true shrimp, crabs, lobsters, etc

Answer 5

Prawns are shrimp that still have their head attached. They may seem bigger because they still have the head. Other wise they are the same.

Answer 6

in the wet market, i have seen prawns and shrimps side by side and given them to be the same in size: other than the tail, prawns have harder skins and they are altogether darker in color. i have never seen small prawns but shrimps go way down in size they are even sold in millimeter sizes.

Answer 7

Prawns are huge shrimp.

Prawns are also what they call shrimp in China and Australia.

Answer 8

They're similar exept prawns are much bigger

Answer 9

prawns are bigger a lot bigger

Answer 10

imagine a lobster ok shrink it that is a prawn a shrimo is the "C" shaped thing that everyone loves