Shrimp

How to spell shrimp

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shrimp

What does shrimp mean?

1. nounA small edible shellfish with a long body, slender legs, and a thin shell, eaten as seafood.
2. nounAn informal, often teasing term for a very small or slight person.

Shrimp in a sentence

• The recipe calls for a pound of peeled shrimp and a clove of garlic.

• He was the smallest boy in the class, and the others called him a shrimp.

• She ordered a starter of grilled shrimp with lemon and butter.

• Despite being a shrimp next to his teammates, he was the fastest runner.

Where does shrimp come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shrimp comes from Middle English shrimpe, recorded from around the late 1300s, and is rooted in the same old Germanic family of words that meant 'to shrink', 'to contract', or 'to wrinkle up'. The connection makes good sense once you picture the animal: a small creature with a body that curls and contracts, so it was named for being shrunken and tiny. From that same shrinking idea English also gained the closely related notion of something puny, which is why shrimp was used quite early as a teasing label for a small or slight person. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, keeping the awkward consonant cluster shr- at the front and the -mp at the end. The main trap is purely phonetic: the 'shr' blend is easy to slip into 'shr' versus 'sr' or 'shch' when typing quickly, though most adults spell it without trouble.

How the word is built

• shrimp (a single root word; related to an old Germanic base meaning 'to shrink or contract', describing the creature's small curled body)