# back to the drawing board

Pronunciation: US say "bak tuh thuh DRAW-ing bord" /ˌbæk tə ðə ˈdɹɔɪŋ ˌbɔɹd/; UK say "bak tuh thuh DRAW-ing bawd" /ˌbæk tə ðə ˈdɹɔːɪŋ ˌbɔːd/; AUS say "BAK tuh thuh DRAW-ing bawd"

## Idiom

1. Used to indicate that an attempt has failed and a new strategy must be started from the very beginning.
   - Simple: Said when a plan has failed and you need to start again with a new idea.
   - _After the prototype overheated during testing, the engineers were sent back to the drawing board._
   - _The marketing campaign flopped badly, and the agency had to go back to the drawing board._

## Origin

The expression was coined as the caption "Well, back to the old drawing board." for a Peter Arno cartoon in The New Yorker on March 1, 1941, which depicted an engineer walking away from a crashed plane.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/back-to-the-drawing-board (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).