pepsi
n. C / Un. a famous brand of sweet, dark soda with bubbles. It is one of the most popular soft drinks in the world.
n. a globally recognised brand of carbonated soft drink, typically cola-flavoured. Founded in 1893 and owned by PepsiCo.
I would like a cold Pepsi with my lunch.
The restaurant does not serve Coca-Cola, so the waiter asked if a Pepsi would be an acceptable substitute.
The marketing campaign focused on the 'Pepsi Challenge,' a blind taste test designed to prove that consumers preferred their formula over the leading competitor.
Originally short for Pepsi-Cola, coined in 1898 as a renaming of the brand from "Brad's Drink", in order to imply that the fizzy drink could cure dyspepsia. While some have suggested Pepsi is short for the digestive enzyme pepsin, sometimes with the assumption that pepsin was used as an ingredient in Pepsi, this is a folk etymology, as there is no official confirmation of it nor any evidence for a link between the enzyme and the beverage. Nonetheless, both the words pepsin and dyspepsia ultimately derive from Ancient Greek πέψις (pépsis), which means “cooking, fermentation or digestion”. (Compare Italian pepsi, from the same source.) (person from Quebec): In reference to their supposed love of junk food.
When capitalised, it refers to the brand or company; when lowercase, it often refers to a single glass or can of the drink.