Idiom
go back to the drawing board
Meaning
To start again; to scrap a previous idea or plan and try again from the beginning.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“The plan failed, so we must go back to the drawing board.”
“Since the client rejected our initial design proposal, the team decided to go back to the drawing board to create something better.”
“After the experimental results proved inconclusive, the researchers were forced to go back to the drawing board and rethink their entire methodology from the start.”
Examples
simple
“The plan failed, so we must go back to the drawing board.”
contextual
“Since the client rejected our initial design proposal, the team decided to go back to the drawing board to create something better.”
complex
“After the experimental results proved inconclusive, the researchers were forced to go back to the drawing board and rethink their entire methodology from the start.”
Origin
From Peter Arno's 1941 New Yorker cartoon showing a crashed plane and an engineer saying 'Well, back to the old drawing board.'
Key words
Related idioms
- Level
- B2 · Upper Intermediate
- Updated