means A small edible shellfish similar to a shrimp, with a long body, ten legs, and a hard segmented shell, prized as seafood.

from From Middle English 'prane' or 'prayne,' a word whose deeper roots are genuinely murky — it surfaces in English in the late medieval period with no clear ancestor, and etymologists frankly admit they don't know where it came from. The modern 'prawn' spelling, with its inserted 'w,' settled in later, but the creature kept swimming through the language long before anyone could explain its name.