deuced

Meanings

1. 1
   adv

   old-fashioned informal: very or extremely, used for emphasis

   The mechanism was deuced clever for such an old design.

2. 2
   adj

   old-fashioned informal: damned or confounded

   We had a deuced time finding the path in the fog.

From deuce + -ed. Deuce had long served as a mild euphemism for the devil in expressions such as "what the deuce?" Deuced developed as a softened substitute for damned and then as a general emphatic meaning "very" or "extremely."

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