It is important to point out that we are not so much interested in dispersive prisms that split a beam of white light into its spectrum of colors, although they make great album covers.

We can split white light into a spectrum of colours using glass prisms or the reflective side of a CD. Most objects we think of as black aren't truly black. They are more usually very dark colours ...

Powell prism (Powell Lens) is a specially designed aspheric optical prism, mainly used to convert Gaussian beams (such as laser beams) into linear light spots evenly distributed along a straight line.