Pepsi is a famous American cola: a dark, sweet, fizzy drink with no alcohol, sold almost everywhere in the world. People often use the name the way they use a kind of drink, not only a company name — “Can I have a Pepsi?” It sits beside Coca-Cola as one of the two big cola names, and fans argue about which they like, though actually a lot of people just want a cola and take whichever bottle is in the fridge. The word is everyday and informal. In 1898 the makers renamed an older drink called Brad’s Drink to Pepsi-Cola, hoping the name would hint that the bubbles might help with dyspepsia — an old word for that heavy, unhappy, bad-digestion feeling. Some people later said Pepsi was short for pepsin, a juice in the stomach, and even that pepsin went into the drink, but that is a folk story: there is no real evidence for it. Nobody is buying Pepsi as medicine now; it is just a brand of cola.