Meaning
Back to the planning stage because a plan, design or attempt has failed and must be started again from the beginning. Applied to projects, strategies, prototypes and proposals rather than minor or recoverable setbacks. Informal to neutral; wry tone that acknowledges failure while promising a fresh attempt. Regional use: General English; American in origin.
Origin
This idiom has an unusually precise origin: a cartoon by Peter Arno in The New Yorker of 1 March 1941, showing a military engineer walking away from a crashed aeroplane with his rolled-up drawings and saying, 'Well, back to the old drawing board.' The caption spread during the Second World War as servicemen and engineers applied it to failed designs, and it was in ordinary American newspaper use by 1947. The drawing board itself, the board on which draughtsmen fixed paper to draft designs, had been a standard tool of engineers and architects for some two centuries, which made the joke instantly legible. Arno sometimes bought gags from writers, so exactly who first phrased the line is uncertain, but the 1941 cartoon is the documented launching point of the expression.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- back to the old drawing board
- it's back to the drawing board for someone
- straight back to the drawing board
Usage Examples
- The prototype collapsed in the wind tunnel, so the team went back to the drawing board.
- Voters rejected the scheme, and it is back to the drawing board for the city's transport strategy.
- Every failed launch taught them something; 'back to the drawing board' was practically the lab motto.