Tuesday, August 4, 2026 · #1
Word Groups— Tuesday, August 4, 2026
About Word Groups
Word Groups gives you a four-by-four grid of sixteen words and one instruction: find the four groups of four that belong together. Nothing on the board tells you what the categories are. The whole puzzle is the act of noticing that four of these words are types of knot, or all end in a hidden animal, or are all anagrams of European capitals — and then trusting that reading enough to commit.
Every grid is built with a deliberate difficulty ramp. One group is a plain semantic set you will spot in seconds, one is a slightly narrower category, and two are wordplay: hidden words, shared prefixes and suffixes, homophones, anagrams. The easy group is the way in; the tricky ones are what stop you finishing in thirty seconds. The satisfying part is usually the moment a word you had confidently slotted into the easy group turns out to be the one that makes the hardest group work.
The sixteen words are always sixteen different words, and no two groups on the same board share a tag, so a word can never legitimately sit in two categories at once. That check runs on every candidate board before it ships, which is what makes the puzzle fair: if you can justify a group of four, it is either the right group or you have missed a better reading of one of its words. Come back tomorrow for a completely fresh grid.
How to play Word Groups
- 1Read all sixteen words on the grid before you touch anything. The first four that look related are rarely a whole group.
- 2Select four words you think share a hidden connection, then submit them as a group.
- 3A correct group locks in, is labelled with its category, and clears out of the grid, leaving twelve words behind.
- 4A wrong guess costs you one of your four lives. Run out and the board is revealed.
- 5Work down the ramp: the groups are ordered from the most straightforward category to the trickiest piece of wordplay, so solving the easy one first shrinks the search space for the rest.
- 6Finish all four groups to solve the grid. The last four words are free — if the first three are right, the remainder must be the fourth group.
Word Groups strategy
- Look for the overlap trap first. Puzzle setters seed a board with words that fit an obvious category but are actually needed elsewhere — if five or six words look like they belong to the same easy group, one or two of them are borrowed, and the real group is somewhere else.
- Start from the words that only make sense one way. A word with a single obvious meaning anchors a group; the flexible words (BASS, LEAD, PITCH) are almost always the ones doing double duty.
- When you find five candidates for one category, name the category as precisely as you can. Widening "animals" to "animals that appear inside longer words" or narrowing to "farm animals" usually excludes exactly one of the five.
- Say the words out loud when you stall. Homophone and hidden-word groups are invisible on the page and obvious in the ear — PLANE, WAIST, BERRY and STAKE only look random until you hear them.
- Check letters, not just meanings. Two of the four groups on every board are wordplay: scan for shared prefixes and suffixes, for words that become other words when you drop a letter, and for anagrams of a common theme.
- Guess the group you are most certain about, not the one you thought of first. Lives are the real currency here, and a locked-in group removes four words from every other decision you have left.
Recent Word Groups puzzles
Every past puzzle is still playable, and each has its own hints and answer page.
Word Groups — common questions
How do I know a word belongs to only one group?
Because every board is vetted before it ships. All sixteen words must be distinct, and no two categories on the same board may share a tag, so you never face two groups that could each legitimately claim the same word. If a word seems to fit twice, one of the two readings is the trap and the other is the answer.
Are the four groups equally hard?
No, and that is deliberate. Each board takes one group from each of four difficulty bands. Band one is a plain everyday category, band two is narrower, and bands three and four are wordplay — hidden words, prefixes and suffixes, homophones and anagrams. They are shown easiest first on the answer page.
How many wrong guesses do I get?
Four lives. A wrong group costs one; three correct groups mean the last four words are handed to you. Because guessing is punished and the easy group is genuinely easy, the smart order is almost always easiest first.
Will the same category come back?
Not for a long time. Each difficulty band has its own shuffled running order over the whole bank, and a band works through every one of its groups before any of them can appear again. With four bands cycling at slightly different lengths, the exact combination of four categories on a given day is effectively unique.
Is the puzzle the same for everybody?
Yes. The board is a pure function of the date in UTC, so every player who opens the same date sees the same sixteen words in the same order, and the archive will still show that exact grid years from now.
What if I find a different set of four that genuinely works?
It happens — English is generous. But only one partition of all sixteen words into four labelled groups is consistent, so a clever alternative for one group always leaves the remaining twelve words impossible to split. Keep going and the contradiction will show up.
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