The story
It’s easy to picture a Victorian gentleman saying “What the dickens?” and to guess the phrase has something to do with Charles Dickens. It doesn’t. The expression was already old when he was born in 1812.
“Dickens” was a polite stand-in for “devil.” In an age when swearing by the devil was a shocking thing to say aloud, people swapped in a harmless word that started with the same sound. Dictionaries call this kind of swap a minced oath, the same trick behind “gosh” and “darn.”
The earliest printed example found so far comes from a 1599 play, King Edward IV, usually credited to Thomas Heywood: “What the dickens is it loue that makes ye prate to me so fondly.”
Shakespeare used it too. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Page pretends she can’t recall the name of the knight who’s been pestering her: “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of.” She knows perfectly well it’s Sir John Falstaff.
Why “dickens” in particular? No one knows for sure. It may come from Dickin or Dickon, old pet forms of the name Richard. A popular idea that it grew out of “devilkin,” a little devil, has no evidence behind it.
