Idioms

the dickens

dickens

1. The devil. Typically used as an intensifier. What the dickens is going on in here? I heard that loud bang all the way down the hall. Ouch, I banged my elbow off the table. That hurts like the dickens! We've been working like the devil to get the update finished before the Christmas break.
2. A mischievous child. A: "Ella just pulled over a chair so she could reach the cookies on the high shelf." B: "Boy, she's a clever little dickens, that's for sure." A: "Look at this sneaky dickens!" B: "How did he just climb out of his playpen like that?" And who is this handsome little dickens trying to get at the wedding cake? Are you the ring bearer?
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the dickens

verb
See also: dickens
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
See also:
References in classic literature
Here I had the dickens' own time keeping the female from Juag's throat.
Lucinda says the Dickens family still follows a similar pattern, adding: "He made the Christmas everyone loves.
Previous sources such as George Ford and Lauriat Lane's The Dickens Critics (1961) and Philip Collins' Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1971) were selective in discussing and reprinting reviews from the period, whereas Grass's coverage is more thorough.
The Dickens Inn on Southfield Road, Middlesbrough, has undergone a PS600,000 revamp in the past 12 weeks.
It might be fairer to refer to the topic as the Dickens scandals, since, even during his life, there was disapproving talk of his relationship with his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth.
This work presents papers by scholars of Dickens and 19th-century culture, culled from a conference organized by the Dickens Journals Online website project, which offers a digital archive of Dickens's magazines.
We began the Dickens birthday celebration with a service of Thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey, at Poets' Corner, where Dickens is buried.
She said that during the five years she spent researching and writing the Dickens biography, the subject had taken over her life "completely".
He told how the males of the Dickens family still meet up in his favourite London pub, the George and Vulture, to catch up every year.
Both of these houses have since been demolished, but the Dickens Fellowship bought 48 Doughty Street in 1924, opening it as a museum the following year under the auspices of a charitable trust.
And the latest chapter in the Dickens dynasty also begins as the world gears up to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the author's own birth this year - with more lavish adaptations of his novels planned, plus a film of his life starring Ralph Fiennes.
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