FOURPLAY
September 1, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown
Four groups, four words each — here's the connections between today's words.
How everyone did today
Baby Milestones
Rolling, Crawling, Standing, Walking
These four track the standard physical progression of an infant figuring out how to get around. As the easiest group of the day, there are no clever double meanings to untangle here, just the classic sequence of childhood development in motion. If you found yourself overthinking this one, you were simply moving too fast.
___ man
Ice cream, Garbage, Spider, Gingerbread
Tack the word man onto the end of each of these, and you get four very different figures: an essential municipal worker, a summer neighborhood icon, a festive cookie, and a friendly neighborhood superhero. Sitting at difficulty rank two today, this was a straightforward fill-in-the-blank set designed to reward a little suffix testing. Hopefully you did not get too tangled up in the web before spotting the pattern.
Farm Animal Noises
Oink, Moo, Baa, Cluck
Old MacDonald would have sorted this set out in seconds, but as the penultimate challenge today, you might have overthought the simplicity. Pigs oink, cows moo, sheep baa, and chickens cluck. Sometimes a barnyard chorus is just a barnyard chorus, no cryptic wordplay required.
Animal Noises That Can Be Homophones
Bark, Hoo, Woof, Neigh
If today's hardest group sounded like a barnyard chorus, that was entirely by design. Each of these animal noises sounds identical to a completely different word, from who and nay to barque and the woven threads of weft and woof. Hopefully your ear was tuned to the phonetic puns before you barked up the wrong tree.
Why these four groups
The engine of this grid is obviously the eight-word animal sound trap, where solvers must separate standard farm noises like Oink, Moo, Baa, and Cluck from homophonic phonetics like Neigh, Bark, Woof, and Hoo. The baby milestones offer an unmistakable entry point because Rolling, Crawling, Standing, and Walking are too physically descriptive to get tangled elsewhere. That structural clarity preserves the difficulty curve: after locking down the infant steps and the classic prefix with Gingerbread and Spider, solvers are forced to look past surface-level onomatopoeia to resolve the subtle sonic trickery waiting at the top tier.