FOURSURE

September 17, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

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

We start off today on the easiest ground with standard military units. Company, squad, platoon, and battalion are all formal subdivisions used by armed forces to organize troops. Unless you were distracted by the more corporate or casual meanings of the first two, assembling this chain of command should have been a straightforward march.

All four of these describe someone who actually means what they say and keeps their word. Honest, sincere, trustworthy, and truthful are direct synonyms for being genuine, making this a straightforward set of virtues rather than a trick. If you took them at face value, you walked away with a clean solve.

You were looking for a warren of famous rabbits here, even if one of them is technically human by birth. Roger and his sultry cartoon wife Jessica share the bill with Beatrix Potter's mischievous Peter and Lewis Carroll's chronically tardy White Rabbit. Landing at rank three, this group relied on whether you could look past ordinary first and last names to spot the literary and cinematic lagomorphs hiding in plain sight.

Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe absorbed everything, these four were suiting up in blue spandex for the 2005 adaptation of Fantastic Four. You had Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman, Chris Evans long before his Captain America days as the Human Torch, Michael Chiklis under heavy orange prosthetics as The Thing, and Ioan Gruffudd stretching it out as Mr. Fantastic. As the trickiest solve of the day, it required you to look past general Hollywood surnames and remember a very specific mid-aughts superhero roster.