Word.ws English Dictionary

gone back to the drawing board

gone back to the drawing board is the past participle of go back to the drawing board.

Meaning of go back to the drawing board

Verb

go back to the drawing board (third-person singular simple present goes back to the drawing board, present participle going back to the drawing board, simple past went back to the drawing board, past participle gone back to the drawing board)

  1. (idiomatic) To start again; to scrap a previous idea or plan and try again from the beginning.
    • After the original plan failed miserably, they decided to go back to the drawing board and come up with something new.

Questions about gone back to the drawing board

What is gone back to the drawing board the past participle of?
Gone back to the drawing board is the past participle of go back to the drawing board.

Words near gone back to the drawing board in the dictionary

  1. gone back
  2. gone back a long way
  3. gone back in time
  4. gone back on
  5. gone back to
  6. gone back to the drawing board
  7. gone back to the tools
  8. gone backwards
  9. gone bad
  10. gone ballistic
  11. gone balls up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone back to the drawing board (page history and authors); go back to the drawing board (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.

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