How long have people been saying "What the deuce?"

Search: "what the deuce" origin

Why: In Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39):

"What the deuce is the matter with him?" exclaimed Crowl, throwing the door open.

When I heard that this morning, I just about fell off my camel. Stewie Griffin says it a lot.

Answer: For-freaking-ever! The phrase has appeared in a lot of old literature, like:

• The Misanthrope (1666) - Molière
  
• The Three Musketeers (1844) - Alexandre Dumas
• Cousin Betty (1846) - Honoré de Balzac
• Jane Eyre (1847) - Charlotte Brontë
  
• The Westminster Review (1886)
  
• A Study in Scarlet (1888) - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  
• Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) - Robert A. Heinlein
  

Etc etc. There are a lot.

So these aren't really all that "old school," is what I'm saying.

Source: Google Books, Oxford University Press, Maven's Word of the Day

The More You Know: The "deuce" is the devil! In 16th Century Germany, you said it like, "Was der Daus!"

The original sense in English was 'bad luck', in sentences such as "a deuce on him!" This apparently developed from the first deuce in the sense 'bad luck at dice', on the grounds that a throw of two on a pair of dice is the worst possible score.

The senses that are more familiar now are usually regarded as euphemisms for devil in mild oaths, such as "what the deuce," "the deuce to pay," "the deuce take it," etc. This usage may be influenced by Low German duus 'the devil', used in similar oaths, but the Low German usage may itself be from French in the 'bad luck at dice' sense.

The derived forms are deuced as an adjective meaning 'confounded; damned', and deuced or deucedly meaning 'damnedly; extremely' ("It's a deuced fine car!"). All forms are more characteristic of British English than American English.

The deuce clearly meaning 'two' dates from the late fifteenth century. The deuce largely meaning 'bad luck' or 'the devil' dates from the mid-seventeenth century.

And PS, "Dickens" (e.g. Charles Dickens) kinda means "devil," too. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Shakespeare even wrote:

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is