Here’s a small puzzle from the seafood aisle. The exact same animal — one species, unchanged — is sold as northern shrimp, pink shrimp, deep-sea prawn, coldwater prawn, Nordic shrimp, and great northern prawn. Same creature. Six names. And the world’s leading fisheries authority files it under a seventh.
Let me untangle it, because the confusion is more interesting than it looks.
The species is Pandalus borealis. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization officially calls it the “northern prawn.” Much of the UK market calls it “coldwater prawn.” North America tends to call it “shrimp.” All describing the identical animal — the one that might be sitting in your fridge right now.
So which is it? Shrimp or prawn?
Most people reach for the same answer: prawns are big, shrimp are small. It’s tidy, it’s intuitive, and it’s wrong. Size has nothing to do with it. There are tiny prawns and there are large shrimp, and markets happily mislabel both — calling any large shrimp a “prawn” simply because it looks impressive.
The real distinction, if you want one, is biological — and it’s stranger than the size myth.
“Shrimp” and “prawn” actually refer to two different suborders of crustacean. True shrimp belong to one branch of the family tree; true prawns belong to another, with different gill structures, different leg arrangements, even different ways of carrying their eggs. By that proper scientific standard, they’re genuinely distinct animals.
And here’s where it gets pointed for this species.
Pandalus borealis is, biologically, a shrimp. It sits in the shrimp branch, not the prawn one. Which means the widely used name “coldwater prawn” — the one on shelves across Britain and beyond — is, strictly speaking, not accurate. A popular, established, perfectly legal name that the biology simply doesn’t support.
So why does any of this survive? Because “shrimp” and “prawn” were never really scientific terms to begin with. They’re language, and language is regional. In the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, “prawn” is the everyday catch-all for both. In North America, “shrimp” does that job, and “prawn” gets reserved for anything large or freshwater. Neither region is wrong. They’re just speaking different dialects of the same seafood.
For anyone buying across borders, this is worth understanding rather than untangling. If you source this species internationally, you’ll meet it under half a dozen names, on packaging that contradicts itself from one country to the next — and it’s all the same cold-water animal underneath. The label changes at the border. The shrimp doesn’t.
So: shrimp or prawn? The honest answer is that it’s a shrimp wearing a lot of names — and depending on where you’re standing, you’ll call it something different and still be understood.
Sometimes the most confusing thing on the label is the very first word.
