devil a bit

adv

adv

Colloquial, Dated Synonym of not at all.

“Devil a bit, Ma’am,” said the Major. “We couldn’t afford it. Unless the world was peopled with J.B.’s—tough and blunt old Joes, Ma’am, plain red herrings with hard roes, Sir—we couldn’t afford it. It wouldn’t do.”1846 October 1 – 1848 April 1, Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1848, →OCLC:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.