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The 16 words below may be partitioned into 4 groups of 4 connected words.
The resulting four words also have a connection which is a seven-letter word.

ONE POTATO PINK FOUR
CORN RANCH SOY SINGLE
PLANK TRICK CAR DREAMS
ROMAN PEA RECORDS SIMPLE

Can you identify the four groups and the associated group-words?
What is the word that links the group-words together?

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  • $\begingroup$ It occurred to me to add the knowledge tag - mainly because some of the connections might not be common knowledge depending on what part of the world you are from, but nothing very specialist is required. $\endgroup$
    – hexomino
    Apr 10, 2021 at 9:36
  • $\begingroup$ I have an idea... but can I check if you intend rot13(Bar, enapu, cvax & erpbeqf) to be a set? $\endgroup$
    – jsm
    Apr 10, 2021 at 12:56
  • $\begingroup$ @jsm Apologies, I was AFK but, yes, you were onto something. $\endgroup$
    – hexomino
    Apr 10, 2021 at 17:41

3 Answers 3

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Group one:

Potato, corn, dreams, pea - sweet prefixes these (posted by Rand).

Group two:

Single, plank, car, simple - ton suffixes these (posted by Amoz).

Group three:

Four Candles - a famous sketch from The Two Ronnies playing on fork 'andles.
Soy candles - soy wax is a natural alternative to paraffin wax in candles.
Trick candles - these relight themselves by igniting magnesium inserted in the wick.
Roman candles - a traditional type of fireworks.

Group four:

Cadillac One - the US presidential state car.
Pink Cadillac - e.g. Clint Eastwood film or Bruce Springsteen song.
Cadillac Ranch - a sculpture in Amarillo or Bruce Springsteen song.
Cadillac Records - a 2008 film on the life of the Chicago record executive Leonard Chess.

Word which links the groups together:

Sweet Sixteen.
Sixteen Tons - a notable song written by Merle Travis about a coal miner.
Sixteen Candles - a 1984 American coming-of-age comedy film starring Molly Ringwald.
Cadillac Sixteen - a concept car which had a V16 13.6 liter engine.

Title: A Connect Wall You Can Count On

There are 16 words in a Connect wall, or Base 16 is used for counting and posted by hexomino.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yep. The first 3 groups are exactly what I had, and the connecting theme was obvious from those, except that I couldn’t find any connection between the remaining 4: I’ve never heard of any of the Cadillac references. $\endgroup$
    – jsm
    Apr 10, 2021 at 16:38
  • $\begingroup$ @jsm - I was also stuck on the last one, and thought the overall connecting theme was strong enough for it to be a group, except possibly to switch a word with Group 3. I hope the connect for it is not too obscure (they have Wikipedia pages but maybe not all notable). A different reason I considered for it was they are made of atomic elements. I used the plurals of Groups 2 in the overall group. $\endgroup$
    – Tom
    Apr 10, 2021 at 16:53
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First group:

SWEET (sweetcorn, sweet potato, sweet dreams, sweet pea).

Second group:

NUMBERS? (one, four, Roman numbers, ???). This would also explain the title.

Third group:

SAUCE? (soy sauce, ranch sauce, pink sauce, ???).

Remaining words:

plank, trick, car, records, single, simple.

Partial answer - hopefully that's acceptable for a Connect Wall puzzle

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    $\begingroup$ This is teetering on the edge of what I would consider a "significant enough" partial answer to a Connect Wall... but maybe it's fine? Not downvoting, anyways. Another half-formed idea I had was something about music - "records", "single" - but I couldn't find other words that fit. $\endgroup$
    – bobble
    Apr 8, 2021 at 17:01
  • $\begingroup$ Pink sauce would fit too in your category $\endgroup$ Apr 8, 2021 at 17:12
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    $\begingroup$ @Arturo I hadn't heard of pink sauce, but OK. Thanks! $\endgroup$ Apr 8, 2021 at 17:15
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    $\begingroup$ I agree with bobble that this is right on the edge of significant enough for a partial answer. When I make these connect walls, I try to construct the groups in a way that once you've figured out the connection you can find at least four words that fit it reasonably quickly. If it's too much of a struggle, it's probably wrong. $\endgroup$
    – hexomino
    Apr 8, 2021 at 21:57
  • $\begingroup$ FWIW I have a group of four I'm pretty confident about that is not either of Rand's two incomplete ones. [EDITED to add:] Nor of course is it Rand's set of four; I shall not comment on whether I believe that one or not, since that would leak information about my (other?) set of four. $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan
    Apr 8, 2021 at 22:41
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This seems a bit farfetched, but I looked though a few of the OP's historical connect walls and determined they are pretty liberal with red herrings, extra "unused matches", and stretching the idea of groups, so I am considering this at least within the realm of possibility. The key here is to note OP likes to make "at least four" words fit, that is, there can be more than four and the less likely fifth one is the one that makes it all tie together at the end.

Group One:
Let's start with Rand's great start. Seems fair enough:

SWEETER THINGS - Sweet Potato, Sweet Dreams, Sweet Pea, and Sweet Soy (sweet soy sauce, for example). Why Sweeter and not Sweet? We'll get to that. Could be wrong.

Group 2:
I suspect this is the one Gareth and I noted:

Words that can end in 'TON'. This group arises because "Plank" has very few alternate options.
TON - Plank(ton), Single(ton), Simple(ton), Car(ton)

Group 3:
Now things get dicey. I found a prior connect wall with "similar homophones" and other such things, so I am going to suggest the connection is:

HT, or "words associated with things that sound like HT/TH", that is, "hit/hat/hot/th/ht". Records is actually associated with 'hit', which is how I discovered this group, but we'll need that later as you'll see.
One ('one hit wonder'), Four ('fourth'), Pink ('hot pink'), Trick ('hat trick')

Now we tread into shark infested waters. Things look grim. But wait! The connecting theme is 'things you can count on'. Well an obvious guess is

"NUMBERS", and we've already made "SWEET TON HT" (before I renamed SWEET to SWEETER). This anagrams to: ONETWTHES".
It would seem we just need "ORE" to be our last group and we've created "ONE TWO THREES", meaning "NUMBERS". Which is clued by ONE and FOUR in the grid, incidentally.
"RE" we can get by just calling Group 1 'SWEETER things' instead of 'SWEET things'. After all, they are sweeter than the other words in the wall. Which leaves "O"....

Group 4:

O - The 4 remaining words do indeed have the property that you can add "O" and anagram them into another English word.
Corn (Corn + O = Croon), Records (Records + O = Corrodes), Roman (Roman + O = Maroon, also more directly Romano which could be a hint), Ranch (Ranch + O = Anchor). This looks like a marvelous coincidence but it is made possible by leveraging the fact that many words fit in multiple groups, yet only one master solution puts four in each group. So it took a little finagling.

So it would seem that our four groups are found, and connected by

One, two threes, that is, the NUMBERS (7 letter solution, which truly you can count on).

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  • $\begingroup$ Gosh, I hope I've never done anything like you've suggested in Group 3, that would seem mightily unfair. The connections in the groups and the overall connection should be as solid as what you've found for groups 1 and 2. $\endgroup$
    – hexomino
    Apr 10, 2021 at 9:33
  • $\begingroup$ Glad to hear, I agree. I'm stumped then. : ) $\endgroup$
    – Amoz
    Apr 10, 2021 at 12:22
  • $\begingroup$ (I hereby confirm that my group 2 is the same as yours. :-) ) $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan
    Apr 10, 2021 at 12:56
  • $\begingroup$ Btw the 123s is wrong, correct? Because I had found other ways to reach that; this one required more stretching but the least knowledge, which had seemed safer. $\endgroup$
    – Amoz
    Apr 10, 2021 at 14:35

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