draw a blank 
idiom, informal

- to fail to get an answer or a result

- to be unable to remember something to get no response or result; to fail to find something

- to elicit no response, or fail to find, remember, or accomplish something

Cambridge Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary

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PHRASE ORIGIN

The original blank wasn’t inside anyone’s head. It was an unsuccessful lottery ticket.

In sixteenth-century lotteries, some slips carried details of prizes while others were blank. To draw one of the empty slips was to win nothing. Blank itself came through Old French blanc, meaning white, from a Germanic source associated with brightness or shining.

The lottery meaning of blank is recorded from the 1560s. Written examples of draw a blank appeared in the early nineteenth century. Washington Irving used the literal image in Tales of a Traveller in 1824: “It is like being congratulated on the high prize when one has drawn a blank.”

The expression soon escaped the lottery booth. It came to describe any fruitless search or attempt and, eventually, the familiar moment when memory produces nothing.

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THE SHAPE OF A MISSING WORD

You can’t produce the word, yet you’re convinced it has three syllables and starts with a particular letter. How can you know so much about something you can’t remember?

In 1966, psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeill investigated this awkward halfway state. They read participants definitions of uncommon English words and asked them to supply the words.
Sometimes the answer remained stubbornly out of reach. Yet participants could identify parts of the missing word: some letters, its number of syllables, even where the main stress belonged. As successful recall approached, this information became more accurate. 

That’s the surprising part. A word needn’t return as a complete package. Its outline can arrive before the word itself, rather like recognising a tune’s rhythm while being unable to sing its melody.
The researchers called this partial knowledge “generic recall”. Their findings suggest that remembering isn’t simply a choice between having an answer and having nothing. There can be useful scraps in between.

A tip-of-the-tongue experience is therefore a particular kind of failed recall: the answer is missing, but clues remain. Imagine a crossword with several letters already filled in. We still can’t finish it, although the page is hardly empty.

Sometimes, when we draw a blank, the blank already has a shape.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

be at a loss, blank out, come up empty, DRAW A BLANK, draw blanks, fail to recall, get nowhere, have a blackout (mental lapse), have a mental block, have a senior moment, have a mind like a sieve, have one's mind go blank, strike out

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“I always know the face, but often times I DRAW A BLANK with the person’s name.”

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