Word.ws English Dictionary

went back to the drawing board

went back to the drawing board is the simple past 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 went back to the drawing board

What is went back to the drawing board the simple past of?
Went back to the drawing board is the simple past of go back to the drawing board.

Words near went back to the drawing board in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: went 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: “went back to the drawing board.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/went_back_to_the_drawing_board. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.