outside the box

English
The “nine dots” puzzle. The task is to draw a connected path through all nine dots using only 4 straight lines. Many people try to solve it using an additional, unstated constraint that the lines cannot extend beyond the limits of the outer eight dots (“the box”).
One of many solutions to the puzzle.

Etymology

Unclear. Attested since 1971 (see quotations) with allusion to the nine dots puzzle, where one needs to draw lines outside the perimeter of its nine dots. Earlier related phrases include go outside the dots (1956),[1] step outside the box (1969),[2] and think outside the dots (1970).[3]

Pronunciation
  • Audio (AU)(file)

Prepositional phrase

outside the box

  1. (idiomatic) Beyond the bounds of convention.
    Synonyms: laterally, out of the box, outside of the box
    The boss wants some new ideas—it's time to think outside the box.
    • 1971 September, Michael R. Notaro, Jr., “Management of Personnel: Organization Patterns and Techniques”, in Data Management, volume 9, number 9, page 77:
      "THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX". If you have kept your thinking process operating inside the lines and boxes, then you are normal and average, for that is the way your thinking has been programmed. ... Here are nine dots: If you were asked to pick up a pencil and try to touch every dot using four straight lines only, you would try it this way first. It would be incorrect. That's because this configuration is in the shape of a box and we are conditioned to think this way.

Translations
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See also

References
  1. Anderson, John F. (1954 October 30) “Down to Earth”, in Dallas Morning News, page 1:
    An instructor at M.I.T. began his course with a group of graduate students one day by walking to the blackboard and drawing nine dots in this fashion [...] We are not here to go through old routines. Don't let your thinking be contained in a small square of knowledge. Learn to go outside the dots and you may be the one to solve man's most puzzling problems.
  2. Peale, Norman Vincent (1969 October 25) “Blackmail Is the Problem”, in Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune, page 13
  3. Westell, Anthony (1970 May 23) “Canada Entering Big League In Research”, in Ottawa Journal, page 7:
    The problem, says William Dav[i]d Hopper, is to think “outside the dots" about the questions of how to feed a hungry world. He means that the need is to think imaginatively, creatively, about the development of less-developed countries, and not merely to keep pouring more money and technology into patterns of foreign aid established, not very successfully, over the past 20 years.

Further reading
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