FOURSURE

September 29, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

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

We are starting off as gently as possible today with a stroll through the garden. Tree, bush, shrub, and flower are all basic types of vegetation that do not require any lateral thinking to connect. If you needed a hint for this one, you might need to spend a little more time outdoors.

These four are all prominent car manufacturers, spanning from rugged off-roaders to luxury sedans. As the second group of the day, there was no real trickery here, just a straightforward cruise through familiar automotive brands. If you got stuck, you were likely overthinking the mileage on these names.

If your lawn defense strategy was rusty, this third tier probably gave you some trouble. Peashooter, Wall-nut, Sunflower, and Cherry bomb are all botanicals drafted into the fight against the undead in the tower defense classic Plants vs. Zombies. Hopefully you harvested enough sun to spot the botanical artillery before you lost your brains.

These four last names all belong to American inventors who helped build modern communication technology. Alexander Graham Bell gave us the telephone, Samuel Morse developed the electric telegraph, Thomas Edison brought us the quadruplex telegraph and the phonograph, and Lee de Forest made early radio broadcasting possible with the Audion vacuum tube. The tricky part of this hardest group of the day was likely spotting Forest without his usual lowercase particle attached, leaving him disguised among the trees.