“I cannot tell what the dickens his name is,” reads a line in Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor.” A century later, in 1728, the somewhat less-well-known writer Colley Cibber wrote “The provok’d husband; or, A journey to London,” and included the same exclamation: “The dickens! has this Rogue of a Count play’d us another Trick then?” Another century passed, and in 1834 this came along: “Like those Goths who played the dickens With Rome and all her sacred chickens.”
What the dickens was going on with this phrase, which is still in use (although it does sound a bit dated), was that way back in about the 1400s — maybe even earlier — “dickens” emerged as a slang term for the devil. There was another meaning for “dicken” around the same time too — it was a bird. “Snipe, Godwipe, Dicken, Poppel, Bitter, Hearon white and gray,” reads one example from 1579. But by now, nobody is quite sure which bird “dicken” referred to; the word was much more useful as something to throw into a sentence for emphasis.
“Dickens” probably arose because “Dick” (or “Old Dick”) was a colloquial name for the devil. Reading something like “what the dickens!” might remind you of the similar expression “what the deuce!” And well it should; “deuce” was another euphemism that meant the same thing. Although the two words ended up with the same meaning (among others), they got there very differently. “Deuce” is probably the English version of the Old German phrase “der daus” — which meant the same thing.
Although “Dickens” has been a fairly common English surname for centuries, it’s not connected with “dickens” used as an expression. Charles Dickens, as you might guess, never had any of his characters say “the dickens!” in his books, even though it would have been a natural thing for them to say. Luckily, though, there was an alternative that was just as good. “ The child is..Going to the very Deuce,” says a character in “Dombey and Son.”
