FOURSURE

October 13, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

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

We ease you in today with four words that all take gun as a suffix. Whether you are dealing with vintage mobster firepower like Tommy, military history with Gattling, home improvement using caulk, or science fiction stun weaponry, the missing half was always the same. Consider this the straightforward warm-up before things get weirder.

Cinema has spent decades proving that anything miniature and human-shaped is inherently untrustworthy, and these four lead the charge. Chucky, Annabelle, M3GAN, and Billy the Puppet are all infamous horror movie dolls that brought nightmares to the big screen. They made up the second easiest group today, assuming you did not let their plastic smiles distract you.

Pierce, mark, chase, and skip all double as standard actions you might take, but they also belong on a roll call. Capitalizing them might have given the game away, so leaving them to masquerade as ordinary verbs was half the fun. It is a classic part-of-speech switch that earned this group the penultimate spot on today's difficulty ladder.

You might know them simply as garnishes or aromatics, but botanically speaking, Angelica, Parsley, Dill, and Cilantro are all members of the Apiaceae family, formerly and perhaps more descriptively known as Umbelliferae. We saved this taxonomic deep-cut for the hardest group of the day, hoping you would mistake Angelica for a proper name and miss the shared carrot-family lineage entirely. If you managed to group them without a degree in botany, consider your spice rack thoroughly vetted.