Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a euph. for damned adj.

1791		Mme D’Arblay Diary (1891) III 331: I’ve got a deuced tailor waiting to fit on my epaulette!
1804		‘The Journey to Camp’ S. Foster Damon Yankee Doodle (1959) 9: And there lay pil’d some deuced things / As large as our pumpkins.
1839		Exeter & Plymouth Gaz. 16 Mar. 3/5: The ‘Corn Monopolizers’ now, Have a Deuced hit, Sir! [...] The Biters all are Bit, Sir.
1842		Birmingham Jrnl 26 Nov. 6/5: I shan’t be in time for the ball; [...] I’ve got a deuced tailer waiting to fix on my epaulette.
1851		R.S. Surtees Young Tom Hall (1926) 314: It’s a bad job, a deuced bad job.
1867		Royal Cornwall Gaz. 21 Nov. 6/1: Poetry [...] No long delicious twilight- time, / No skies divinely lucid, / No impulses of lyric rhyme, / No adjective but ‘deuced’.
1887		Sheffield Dly Teleg. 24 May 5/2: ‘There are still a deuced lot of English in London,’ remarked a jocular German.
1898		Binstead & Wells Pink ’Un and Pelican 74: All the boys of those days thought it a deuced sight more blessed to give than to receive.
1900		‘Doss Chiderdoss’ ‘The Return of the Wanderer’ Sporting Times 14 Apr. 1/4: He owed money, did John, when he left England’s shore; / And anon when the dinner-bell chimes for him, / We’ll inform him he now owes a doosid sight more.
1906		Leigh & Lyle [perf. Vesta Tilley] Jolly Good luck to the girl that Loves a Soldier 🎵 I've been in some engagements, too, / And some were duced hot, for one of the girls, nearly captured me.
1918		Wodehouse ‘Jeeves and the Chump Cyril’ in Death at the Excelsior [ebook] ‘Deuced sorry to wake you up, Jeeves’.