Meaning
Literally, returning to school after a vacation. As a merchandising term it names the shopping season just before the school year starts; as a hyphenated adjective ('a back-to-school sale') it describes the products, ads and events aimed at that season. Figuratively, adults go back to school when they return to study or retrain mid-career. Hyphenate only when the phrase works attributively before a noun ('back-to-school sale'); leave it open after a verb ('the children go back to school'). Do not confuse with 'back to square one' or 'back to the drawing board', which mean starting over, not returning to study. Regional use: General English; the retail season's timing varies by country.
Origin
The plain phrase is old - literal uses are easy to find in late-Victorian texts - but the commercial compound grew with mass education and department-store marketing. Google Books corpus data shows the hyphenated form negligible before the 1910s and climbing through the twentieth century (a re-run of the Ngram query for this entry found sporadic hits from 1891 and a sharp rise from 1917). Dated advertisements collected by the Vintage Inn blog include Butterick's 'Back to school dresses for Girls' (1936), Phillip's Milk of Magnesia's 'Back To School; Back To Work' (1946) and Rexall's 'Back to School Specials' (1954). Wikipedia describes the modern merchandising season: in the United States it is associated with Labor Day, retailers mark supplies at steep discounts as loss leaders, and many states run sales-tax-free periods. The linguist Neal Whitman, quoted by the University of Illinois, traced the phrase's drift from adverbial ('time to go back to school') to adjective ('great back-to-school values') to standalone noun.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- back-to-school night
- going back to school
- heading back to school
Usage Examples
- The stationery aisle is already a war zone, and it is not even properly back to school yet.
- After the plant closed, he went back to school and retrained as a paramedic.
- Three children, one printer, no ink: the back-to-school budget landed badly again.