Meaning
An exclamation expressing surprise, irritation, or bewilderment in a question, roughly equivalent to asking what on earth is going on. The key word is a worn-down euphemism for the devil, long bleached of any demonic force, so the whole expression carries a mildly exasperated, old-fashioned flavour. It now sounds dated or quaint, more at home in period fiction than in everyday casual speech. Quaint and faintly theatrical; mostly heard in comic-exasperated questions and deliberate archaism rather than neutral conversation. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean origin).
Origin
The line appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 3 Scene 2, where Mistress Page says 'I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of'. Dickens here is a euphemism for 'devil' - a so-called minced oath - and the Online Etymology Dictionary dates the word to the 1590s, deriving it probably from Dickon, a pet form of Richard. Shakespeare did not coin it: The Phrase Finder records an earlier use in Thomas Heywood's play King Edward IV, Part 1 (1599), 'what the dickens is it love that makes ye prate to me so fondly'. The expression continued as a mild oath through the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries - the novelist Charles Dickens's surname is pure coincidence - and survives today as a consciously antiquated intensifier.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- how the dickens
- where the dickens
- who the dickens
- why the dickens
Usage Examples
- What the dickens is making that banging noise in the attic at this hour?
- Where the dickens did I leave my glasses? They were on this table a minute ago.
- She stared at the reshuffled schedule and muttered, why the dickens would anyone move the launch to a Friday afternoon.