FOURSURE
September 16, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown
Four groups, four words each — here's the connections between today's words.
How everyone did today
Complete rotation
Cycle, Circuit, Loop, Circle
We are starting off today with words that all describe traveling a path that ends right back where it began. Cycle, circuit, loop, and circle are all straightforward terms for a complete rotation or closed path, whether you are talking about electronics, geometry, or your daily routine. Hopefully this gentle warm-up did not send you spinning in circles.
Edible Birds
Turkey, Chicken, Quail, Duck
Turkey, chicken, quail, and duck all share the distinction of being common poultry you might find roasted on a dinner menu. While they are distinct avian species in the wild, the culinary world tends to group them rather pragmatically by how well they pair with sides. This set provided a fairly direct path forward as the second easiest group on the board.
Fast food mascots
Wendy, Ronald, King, Cow
These four are familiar faces from the drive-thru, representing Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, and Chick-fil-A. Stripping Ronald and the Burger King of their titles made them look a bit more generic on the board, but they are all classic fast food mascots. Hopefully you didn't spend too long trying to make royalty or farm animals work instead.
One Word Beatles Songs
Yesterday, Blackbird, Revolution, Because
The Fab Four have dozens of single-word tracks across their catalog, which makes spotting this quartet as the hardest group of the day a test of your discography recall. Yesterday, Blackbird, Revolution, and Because each stand alone as complete titles from the Lennon-McCartney songbook without needing another word attached. If you were searching for a lyrical or thematic link instead of a musical one, that was entirely by design.
Why these four groups
What gives this grid its bite is the way Revolution and Blackbird double-dip into the easier spaces. A solver might reflexively try tossing Revolution into the rotation set with Loop and Circuit, or drafting Blackbird alongside Duck and Turkey in the aviary, but the tight thematic fit of edible birds quickly isolates the latter. That leaves the rotation group to solve cleanly, while Cow and King quietly mask the mascot theme. The Beatles titles naturally anchor the hardest tier, forcing solvers to look past literal nouns and spot the discography hiding in plain sight.