Describes food that has been laid out in the sun until the water in it has gone. The best-known example by far is the sun-dried tomato, which is why many learners meet the word on a pizza menu before anywhere else. But you also see sun-dried mangoes, figs, chillies, mushrooms, fish, and salted plums.

The point of drying food this way is not only to keep it. Drying takes water out, and what is left behind — sugar, salt, the taste of the food itself — becomes concentrated, so the flavour turns much stronger, deeper, often sweeter, and a little chewy. A fresh tomato is light and watery. A sun-dried tomato is dark, intense, almost like a sweet. That change of taste is the whole reason cooks pay more for it.

On a package or a menu, 'sun-dried' is a selling word. It says: dried slowly, by the sun, the old way — not blasted with hot air in a factory machine. Whether that is true is another matter. A great deal of what is sold as sun-dried has spent at least part of its time in a machine, and the rules on the phrase are loose in many countries. So read it as a promise of quality rather than as a fact.

Though actually — the word is not only for food. 'Sun-dried' bricks or clay are a real and common use, especially in writing about older buildings and hot countries. Mud bricks are still made this way. So if you meet 'sun-dried brick' in a history book, nothing is wrong.

Always hyphenated, and it sits in front of the noun: sun-dried tomatoes, not 'tomatoes sun-dried'.