Dyspeptic means relating to dyspepsia — pertaining to indigestion and its sufferings. A dyspeptic patient is one troubled by upper-abdominal pain, fullness, and discomfort with eating; a dyspeptic complaint is indigestion as a clinical presentation. The adjective also colours the older medical portrait: the “dyspeptic” as a character type — sallow, irritable, made miserable by their stomach — was a stock figure of 19th-century medicine, when chronic indigestion was blamed for melancholy and bad temper. Modern usage is strictly clinical, describing symptoms, remedies, and conditions connected with disordered digestion. Like many medical adjectives, it turns a symptom cluster into a descriptor that slots into diagnoses, prescriptions, and case notes — the linguistic machinery that lets medicine talk precisely about the miseries of the stomach.