FOURSURE

September 11, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

Four groups, four words each — here's the connections between today's words.

The easiest group of the day brings together pop royalty who transcended the need for a surname. Whether through decades of reinvention or sheer cultural dominance, Cher, Madonna, Rihanna, and Beyoncé each carved out a career so massive that a single name was more than enough. You likely spotted this superstar quartet before you had time to overthink it.

Slap The Little in front of these words and you get a respectable chunk of your childhood media diet. Whether you were learning about perseverance from an anthropomorphic locomotive or getting philosophical with an asteroid-dwelling prince, the missing prefix was doing all the heavy lifting. At level two, you just needed to spot the shared title trope before the nostalgia fully set in.

If you found yourself mentally shopping for bridal wear, you likely navigated this penultimate group with ease. Empire, ballgown, A-line, and mermaid are all standard cuts and silhouettes used to describe dresses. The trick was seeing past the mythical creatures and historical regimes to spot the high-fashion tailor lurking underneath.

The hardest trick today was spotting what could precede the same word to build something new. Tacking state onto the end of each word turns simple prepositions and prefixes into overstate, prostate, all-state, and upstate. If you were stuck parsing grammar rather than compound words, this group was designed to keep you spinning.