Besides raisins, what other dried fruits and vegetables have their own names?

Dried grapes¹ have their own special word: "raisins". There are a few words for different types of dried meats ("jerky", "prosciutto", etc.). But other than "raisin", I can't think of any special words for dried fruits or vegetables. Dried apples are just "dried apples". Dried tomatoes are "sun-dried tomatoes". And so forth.

Is "raisin" the only word of this kind, or are there any others? Since this seems to be a scarce type of word, I would count foreign language words if they're used at least occasionally as loan-words.

¹ I see from the answer to this more-specific question ( Is there a word for dried blueberries? ) that "raisin" can also be used as a word for some other dried fruits. The question also reminded me that there are a few recently coined words such as "craisin", which suggests that older words of this type are scarce.


One obvious answer is sultanas (AKA golden raisins, defined as dried white grapes - Cambridge). A better answer is prunes (dried plums - Cambridge ) . Interestingly raisin and prune are both the French name for the matching undried fruit.

Another oddity is currant both a small raisin and (black-, white-, or red-) a completely different fruit (Cambridge again).

They're not dried but gherkins are worth a mention too.


A number of Spanish names for chili peppers have migrated into English (at least in parts of the western and southwestern United States, where many types of chilies are sold in fruit and vegetable markets). Three varieties of these peppers have different names when fresh and when dry:

  • poblano chilies (fresh) are called ancho chilies (dried)

  • chilaca chilies (fresh) are called pasilla chilies (dried)

  • jalapeño peppers (fresh) are called morita or chipotle peppers (smoked & dried)

A book called 12 Essential Chili Peppers for Mexican Cooking shows pictures of some of these peppers.

Whether you're inclined to view these words as foreign or as naturalized English depends on where you live and how interested you are in Mexican-style cooking. (The same goes for words like enchilada, tamale, taco, and molé, I suppose.) In the San Francisco Bay Area, the words ancho, pasilla, and chipotle are widely recognized; morita is probably less familiar. I have seen all of the pepper varieties listed above (except fresh chilacas) for sale at the vegetable market where I shop.


Goji berries are dried wolfberries (Lycium barbarum)

If you saw a fresh wolfberry and you knew it looked like the thing on a packet of something that contained "Goji berries", you might call the fresh berry a Goji berry too, but actually Goji are always dried. The name comes from Chinese where Goji is specifically the name of the dried berry.