back to the drawing board

Cultural  

1. 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.”

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back to the drawing board Idioms  

1. 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.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

back to the drawing board

The prosecution said the developers failed to use the first falling window as a reason to "go back to the drawing board".

From BBC ● Aug. 7, 2026

‘I’m going to have to completely go back to the drawing board, rethink my life and probably start at the bottom in a new industry.’

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 11, 2026

The Japanese automaker contends with a thin Infiniti lineup, going back to the drawing board after a failed Honda merger, and overall sales being down 35% from a decade earlier.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 26, 2026

Finally, the federation was forced to run a curtailed version without any commercial partners and has now gone back to the drawing board for the next season.

From BBC ● Jun. 16, 2026

“I suppose we could go back to the drawing board and reallocate our square footage.”

From "A Long Way from Chicago" by Richard Peck