Back to Square one

Back to square one

Meaning

Back to the beginning, to start again.

Origin

There are three widely reported suggestions as to the origin of this
phrase: BBC sports commentaries, board games like snakes and ladders
and playground games like hopscotch. Let's examine them in turn:

BBC Commentaries:

In order that listeners could follow the progress of football games in
radio commentaries, the pitch was divided into eight notional squares.
Commentators described the play by saying which square the ball was
in. The Radio Times, the BBC's listings guide, referred to the
practice in an issue from January 1927.

Commentaries that used a numbering system certainly happened and
prints of the pitch diagrams still exist. Recordings of early
commentaries also exist, including the very first broadcast sports
commentary (of a rugby match). That commentary, and many others that
followed, referred listeners to the printed maps and a second
commentator called out the numbers as the ball moved from square to
square. However, at no point in any existing commentary do they use
the phrase 'back to square one'.

Despite this, the BBC issued a piece in a January 2007 edition of The
Radio Times that celebrated 80 years of BBC football commentary. In
this, the football commentator John Murray stated with confidence that
"Radio Times' grids gave us the phrase 'back to square one'" and that
"the grid system was dropped in the 1930s (not before the phrase 'back
to square one' had entered everyday vocabulary)". This confidence is
despite the fact that, although it could be true, it is nothing but
conjecture. What is a fact is that the BBC broadcast a more measured
view in the popular etymology series Balderdash and Piffle, in
collaboration with the OED, in 2006. This questioned the claims that
the BBC commentaries were the source of the phrase and that it was in
circulation in the 1930s.

It's not the first time that BBC commentators have talked balderdash
and piffle and I doubt it will be the last. Private Eye made something
of a cottage industry out of printing examples of such in their
Colemanballs columns and books. (see over the moon).

Board Games:

Many people report that the phrase refers to Snakes and Ladders or
similar board games. The earliest citation of the phrase in print is
currently 1952, from the Economic Journal:

"He has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is
always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of
snakes and ladders."

Despite that comment, it isn't a feature of Snakes and Ladders that
players are sent back to square one. Of the many examples of such
boards that exist, only a few have a snake in the first square. For
the phrase to have come from that source people must have had occasion
to use it, and that appears not to be the case with Snakes and
Ladders.

Hopscotch

This playground game is played on a grid of numbered squares. The
precise rules of the game vary from place to place but usually
involves players hopping from square to square, missing out the square
containing their thrown stone. They go from one to (usually) eight or
ten and then back to square one.

The game's name derives from 'scotch', which was used from the 17th
century to denote a line scored on the ground and, of course, hopping.
It was referred to in the 1677 edition of Robert Winstanley's
satirical almanac Poor Robin:

"The time when School-boys should play at Scotch-hoppers."

All of the above explanations are plausible enough to gain supporters.
As is usual with phrases of uncertain origin, most people are happy to
believe the first explanation they hear. There's no real evidence to
put the origin beyond reasonable doubt, and so it remains uncertain.

Whatever the source, 1952 is surprisingly late as the earliest
printing for a phrase that was certainly in the spoken language much
earlier than that. There are many believable hearsay examples from at
least thirty years earlier. Perhaps a printed source from before 1952
will yield the truth?