Sunken means fallen below the level of what is around it. A ship on the seabed, or cheeks that have hollowed with illness.
The word goes in front of nouns, and it is the old past participle of sink kept alive as an adjective. A sunken garden and a sunken bath are both deliberately set lower than the ground around them. Applied to a face it is a sign of illness or exhaustion, and sunken eyes and sunken cheeks are standard descriptions. A sunken ship is one nobody has raised.
Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire
First appears in chapter 31 of A Man Called Ove.
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