Grouping Puzzles
Sixteen words, four hidden categories of four. Tap the four you think belong together and submit — a close miss tells you so, rather than just saying no. Every word here belongs to exactly one category: nothing is designed to trick you into a plausible wrong answer.
Also known as a connections puzzle or a category puzzle.
Related Practice
What Is A Grouping Puzzle?
Sixteen words sit on the board. Hidden among them are four categories of four — a solver's job is to work out which four belong together, for every group. Nothing on the board says what the categories are; recognising the shared thread is the entire puzzle. It is also published as a connections puzzle or a category puzzle, after the best-known version of the format.
Why No Word Here Belongs To Two Categories
The famous version of this puzzle deliberately plants a word that could plausibly sit in two different groups — ORANGE could be a fruit or a colour — and that manufactured overlap is most of its difficulty. This site cannot ship that. Every puzzle here promises exactly one right answer for every group, always, and a word that fit two categories would make that promise false: a solver placing it in either group would have a genuine argument for being right.
So the whole word bank is checked for this, once, before any puzzle is dealt. Every word across all twenty categories on this site is required to be distinct from every other one — not just distinct within the four categories a given puzzle draws from, but across the entire bank. That is a stronger guarantee than the puzzle strictly needs, and it is what makes "there is only one way to sort this" true without exception.
Difficulty Comes From The Theme, Not From A Trick
With manufactured overlap ruled out, difficulty has to come from somewhere else — and here it comes honestly from how quickly a category's own theme is likely to be recognised. "Colours" or "fruits" reveal themselves as soon as two members are read; "types of knot" or "sewing tools" take longer, because the words are less immediately familiar as a set. A puzzle's difficulty is the total of what its four categories actually are, not a rating applied by hand.
A Close Miss Is Told Apart From A Wide One
Submitting four words that are not a group is not just wrong — it can be informative. If three of the four genuinely belong to one category and the fourth does not, the board says so, because that is real information a solver can act on: keep three, swap the fourth. A submission from three or more different categories gets a plainer "not a group", since there is nothing more specific to say.
Grouping Puzzles Frequently Asked Questions
What is a grouping puzzle?
Sixteen words hiding four categories of four. Selecting the four words that share a category, for all four groups, solves the puzzle. It is also called a connections puzzle or a category puzzle.
Can a word belong to more than one category?
Not here. Every word across the whole bank is checked to be distinct from every other one, so there is never a genuine argument for placing a word in two different groups — unlike the trick the best-known version of this puzzle is built around.
What happens if I get three out of four right?
The board tells you that three of your four selections belong together and one does not, rather than a plain "wrong" — real information you can act on immediately.
Is there a penalty for mistakes?
No. Mistakes are counted and shown once you finish, out of curiosity, but nothing stops you trying again immediately.
Is it free, and does it need an account?
Free, no account, no adverts, and nothing leaves your browser.