FOURSURE

October 17, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

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

We start things off today with what is likely rattling around in the bottom of your pocket. Quarter, nickel, dime, and penny are the standard circulating coins of American pocket change. There is no trick or double meaning hidden here; consider it an easy warm-up before things get complicated.

These are all colorful labels for someone looking to sell you snake oil, bad advice, or a bridge they do not actually own. Quack might have pointed you toward a duck pond for a second, but alongside charlatan, grifter, and fraud, the dishonest intent was impossible to miss. It made for a fairly direct second group today, provided you were not taken in by the con.

If you spent the round trying to connect American geographic locations to British monarchy or hurried movement, you walked right into the trap. Boston, Kansas, Queen, and Rush are all classic rock bands formed in the 1970s. As today's penultimate group, it required filtering out a lot of literal noise to find the arena-sized overlap.

The hardest group of the day sends you back to literature class, where every single one of these words was originally a character before it became a common descriptor. Quixotic comes from Cervantes's delusional knight, malapropism from Sheridan's tongue-tied Mrs. Malaprop, and gargantuan from Rabelais's giant king Gargantua. As for mentor, you can thank the trusted counselor from Homer's Odyssey for that piece of workplace jargon.