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back to the drawing board
- A saying indicating that one's effort has failed, and one must start all over again: “The new package we designed hasn't increased our sales as we'd hoped, so it's back to the drawing board.”
Idioms and Phrases
Also, back to square one . Back to the beginning because the current attempt was unsuccessful, as in When the town refused to fund our music program, we had to go back to the drawing board , or I've assembled this wrong side up, so it's back to square one . The first term originated during World War II, most likely from the caption of a cartoon by Peter Arno in The New Yorker magazine. It pictured a man who held a set of blueprints and was watching an airplane explode. The variant is thought to come from a board game or street game where an unlucky throw of dice or a marker sends the player back to the beginning of the course. It was popularized by British sports-casters in the 1930s, when the printed radio program included a grid with numbered squares to help listeners follow the description of a soccer game.Example Sentences
Some on social media said the new Type 00 car was "exciting" and "absolutely stunning", while others called it "rubbish" and told Jaguar's designers to "go back to the drawing board".
It would just delay the negotiations and they'll have to go back to the drawing board anyway.
Speaker Johnson must now head back to the drawing board, with just hours left on the clock.
“We have a lot of freshmen and sophomores. Playing a 10-game season — which we didn’t get to do this year — is the motivation. We’ll get back to the drawing board.”
Replies on Jaguar's social media posts about the car ranged from "Go back to the drawing board" and "hopefully this doesn't actually come out" to "Exciting" and "Absolutely stunning".
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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