Word Groups – puzzle for 20 October 2026

Word Groups is a daily word association puzzle. The board shows 16 words that can be sorted into four groups of four. Each group shares a hidden link: a topic, a phrase, a compound word or a bit of wordplay.

Every board is checked before release so that each group has one clear answer, but the red herrings are deliberate: many words look like they could fit more than one group.

How to play

1. Select four words you think belong together and press Submit.
2. If they form a group, it moves to the top of the board as a coloured bar and the category is revealed.
3. A wrong guess costs one attempt. You have four mistakes, after which you can take +2 extra attempts once.
4. Groups are colour-coded by difficulty: yellow is the most straightforward, purple the trickiest.

Tips

• Start with the group you are most sure of, so fewer words are left for the hard ones.
• A word that seems to fit five or six others is probably a decoy. Save it for last.
• Think about other meanings of each word, and what could come before or after it in a compound.

Strategy

• Before you tap anything, scan all 16 words and try to spot five or six possible links. If a theme seems to have five candidates, one of them almost certainly belongs to a different group, and spotting which one is usually the key to the whole board.
• The purple group rarely depends on what the words mean. It tends to play with their form instead: a word that can come before or after each of them, a word hidden inside them, or how they sound. When the last four words look completely unrelated, that is the direction to think in.
• Shuffle is more useful than it looks. Seeing the words in a new order breaks the pairings your eye has settled on and often makes a hidden connection jump out.
• When the game tells you that you are one word away, do not reshuffle the whole guess. Ask which of your four words has a second meaning and swap only that one. The game will not let you resubmit a set you have already tried, so you cannot waste a mistake on the same guess twice.

A worked example

Here is an example board: ASH, ELM, FIR, OAK, PINE, CRAB, BIG, TOFFEE, FOOT, SNOW, EYE, BASKET, POKER, BRIDGE, SNAP, RUMMY. The card games (POKER, BRIDGE, SNAP, RUMMY) are the easiest group, so you lock them in first. Next come trees, and the obvious pick is ASH, ELM, FIR, PINE. The game answers that you are one word away.

That tells you one of the four belongs elsewhere. PINE is the decoy: it also comes before 'apple', just like CRAB, BIG and TOFFEE. Swap it for OAK and the trees are solved. The ball words (FOOT, SNOW, EYE, BASKET) then fall into place, and the purple group turns out to be '___ apple': PINE, CRAB, BIG, TOFFEE.

History of the game

Sorting sixteen clues into four groups of four became famous on British television. The BBC quiz show Only Connect started in 2008, and its best-known round, the Connecting Wall, gives teams exactly this kind of grid, complete with red herrings.

The format went mainstream as a daily online puzzle when The New York Times launched Connections in 2023. Within months it was one of the paper's most played games, second only to Wordle. Word Groups builds on the same idea, with boards written separately for English and Hungarian players rather than translated.

Frequently asked questions

When is a new puzzle released?

A new board goes live every day at midnight (Central European Time). Earlier days can be replayed from the archive.

Can I share my result?

Yes. At the end you get a spoiler-free grid of coloured squares you can send to friends as a challenge.

What does the Hint button do?

You can use it once per puzzle. It reveals the name of one group you have not solved yet, but not its words. Your result notes that a hint was used.

What does 'one word away' mean?

Three of your four words belong to the same group and the fourth does not. It still counts as a mistake, but you know a single swap will get you there.