FOURSURE

October 25, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

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

We are not trying to reinvent the compass with the easiest group of the day. North, South, East, and West are the four cardinal directions, plain and simple. If you spent more than three seconds sorting this one out, you were almost certainly overthinking it.

Following the yellow brick road leads straight to this quartet of iconic desires. The Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, Tin Woodman, and Dorothy each made the trek to the Emerald City hoping the man behind the curtain could grant them brain, courage, heart, and a way back home. Sitting at the second spot today, spotting the connection just required a little pop-culture memory and clicking your heels together.

These four words were sitting around waiting for you to prepend chain to each of them. Doing so yields a medieval suit of mail, a type of fence link, a noisy lumberjack saw, and a chemical or emotional reaction. It is a classic fill-in-the-blank trick that sits just shy of the hardest tier today.

Today's hardest group strips away the monikers to leave you with rap royalty on their tax returns. Marshall Mathers is Eminem, Shawn Carter or Dwayne Carter takes the next spot, Curtis Jackson goes by 50 Cent, and Calvin Broadus rounds things out as Snoop Dogg. If you spent the round trying to assemble famous American presidents or athletes, that misdirection was entirely by design.