Word.ws English Dictionary

back to the drawing board

back to the drawing board adverb: indicates that one must try a different strategy in order to achieve some goal following the failure of a recent attempt.

Adverb

back to the drawing board

  1. (idiomatic) Indicates that one must try a different strategy in order to achieve some goal following the failure of a recent attempt.
    • Well, that didn't work at all, so it's back to the drawing board, I guess.
    • For such cases the only thing is to go back to the drawing board and do it better; and it is here that the highest qualities of vision and human leadership are needed.1958, The Engineer, volume 205, page 920

back to the drawing board meaning in Tamil and Indonesian

back to the drawing board in Tamil

மீண்டும் தொடக்க நிலைக்கு

back to the drawing board in Indonesian

back to the beginning
kembali ke awal, balik ke awal

Examples of back to the drawing board in a sentence

  • If we head for lay up tomorrow, those plans are right down the toilet and it's back to the drawing board.1999, Mark L. Thompson, “Monday, October 28: Lake Michigan, Upbound”, in A Sailor’s Logbook: A Season Aboard Great Lakes Freighters (Great...
  • We need to go back to the drawing board to redesign these and remove the barriers.1999, Muhammad Yunus, “Opinion: Must There be Poverty?”, in Carolyn Dedolph, editor, Rice: Hunger or Hope?: IRRI 1998–1999, Makati City...
  • So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board,” a Google spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement on Thursday.2019 April 5, Sam Levin, “Google scraps AI ethics council after backlash: ‘Back to the drawing board’”, in The Guardian:

Forms of back to the drawing board

alternative formback to the old drawing board

Origin of back to the drawing board

Coined as “Well, back to the old drawing board,” as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Arno of The New Yorker on March 1, 1941, depicting a delighted engineer walking away from a crashed plane.

Questions about back to the drawing board

What does back to the drawing board mean?
Back to the drawing board means indicates that one must try a different strategy in order to achieve some goal following the failure of a recent attempt.
What is back to the drawing board in Tamil?
Back to the drawing board in Tamil is மீண்டும் தொடக்க நிலைக்கு. See Back to the drawing board meaning in Tamil.
How do you use back to the drawing board in a sentence?
If we head for lay up tomorrow, those plans are right down the toilet and it's back to the drawing board.
What part of speech is back to the drawing board?
Back to the drawing board is an adverb.

Words near back to the drawing board in the dictionary

  1. back to back tickets
  2. back to basics
  3. back to front
  4. back to nature
  5. back to square one
  6. back to the drawing board
  7. Back to the Future Day
  8. back to the old drawing board
  9. back to the soil
  10. back to the wall
  11. back tooth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: back to the drawing board (page history and authors); back to the drawing board (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-back to the drawing board.ogg.

Cite this entry: “back to the drawing board.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/back_to_the_drawing_board. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.