If you woke up on September 1, 2025, and saw Bishop Burns Pope Lorde trending, you probably thought the Vatican had finally snapped or that the music world was entering a very strange new era of theological warfare. It sounds like the start of a bad joke. A bishop, a pope, and a pop star walk into a room—and then everything starts burning? Honestly, it’s a lot more mundane than that, but in the world of daily puzzles, it was a total bloodbath for casual players.
We are talking about the New York Times Connections puzzle #813.
The internet has a way of turning a simple word game into a viral moment, and this specific combination of words—Bishop, Burns, Pope, and Lorde—was the perfect storm of "wait, what?" and "oh, I see what you did there." Most people saw those four words and immediately jumped to religious themes. You've got two high-ranking clergy members and a singer who famously wrote a song called "Royals" and has a stage name that sounds vaguely aristocratic or even divine. It was a trap. A beautiful, well-executed trap.
The Connection Most People Missed
The real link between Bishop Burns Pope Lorde had nothing to do with the Catholic Church or the 2017 hit "Green Light." The blue category for that day was actually "Famous Poets."
When you break it down, it makes sense, but only if you haven't been out of an English Lit class for twenty years. You have Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Burns (the "Auld Lang Syne" guy), Alexander Pope, and Audre Lorde. Basically, the NYT editors took four names that function perfectly as nouns in other contexts—specifically religious and musical ones—and hid them in plain sight.
It was brutal.
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I mean, look at the board from that day. You had words like "Clergy Member," "Saint Patrick," and "Saint Valentine" floating around in other categories. If you were playing and saw Bishop, Pope, and Clergy Member, your brain likely locked onto the "Religious Figures" theme like a heat-seeking missile. That is exactly what the puzzle designer, Wyna Liu, wants. It's about misdirection. It’s about making you think you’ve "cracked the code" only to find out you’re three mistakes deep with no lives left.
Why "Bishop Burns Pope Lorde" Became a Meme
The phrase itself is just inherently funny. It sounds aggressive. It sounds like a headline from a 16th-century pamphlet during the Reformation. "Bishop Burns Pope!"
Because Connections has become a daily ritual for millions, these specific word clusters become a shared trauma. People started posting their failed grids on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, and the phrase Bishop Burns Pope Lorde basically became shorthand for "I got outsmarted by a word game today."
But there’s a layer of nuance here that’s actually kinda cool. It highlights how our brains categorize information. We see "Pope" and "Bishop" and we don't think "18th-century satirist" or "20th-century poet laureate." We think of the guys in the big hats. The puzzle forced people to pivot their perspective from the modern and the institutional to the literary and historical.
The "Cardinal" Confusion
To make matters worse, the purple category that day—the hardest one—was "What 'Cardinal' Might Refer To." The answers there were Bird, Clergy Member, MLB Player, and NFL Player.
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Imagine the chaos. You have "Bishop" and "Pope" in the poet category, and then you have "Clergy Member" sitting over in the Cardinal category. It was a linguistic shell game. Honestly, if you managed to solve that one without a single error, you're either a literature professor or you're just guessing wildly and getting lucky.
A Quick Refresher on the Poets
If you’re still scratching your head about why these four names belong together, here is the lowdown on the actual human beings behind the puzzle:
- Elizabeth Bishop: A massive figure in 20th-century American poetry. She won the Pulitzer. She lived in Brazil for a long time. Her work is precise, vivid, and definitely doesn't involve burning any popes.
- Robert Burns: The national poet of Scotland. If you've ever hummed along to a song at midnight on New Year's Eve, you've encountered his work. He’s the "Burns" in the set, and no, he didn't burn anything other than the midnight oil.
- Alexander Pope: The 18th-century master of the heroic couplet. He’s the guy who said, "To err is human, to forgive divine." He was actually Catholic, ironically, which adds another layer to the "Pope" confusion.
- Audre Lorde: A self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." Her work is foundational to modern intersectional feminism. She has nothing to do with the New Zealand singer Lorde (Ella Yelich-O'Connor), though both are icons in their own right.
How to Win at Connections (and Avoid the Trap)
If you want to avoid getting burned by something like Bishop Burns Pope Lorde again, you've got to change how you look at the grid. The NYT is getting increasingly "clever" (or annoying, depending on your caffeine level).
First, never submit your first guess. If you see four words that fit perfectly into a category—like religious titles—look for the fifth word. If you see Bishop, Pope, and Clergy Member, you know there's a problem. A category only has four words. If you find five or six that fit, it means the category you think you see is a "red herring."
Second, think about the parts of speech. Is the word a noun, or could it be a verb? Could it be a last name? In the case of Bishop Burns Pope Lorde, the "trick" was that they were all last names. Whenever you see a group of words that can also be famous surnames, be very, very suspicious.
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Third, look for the "Purple" category first. The purple category is usually a "fill-in-the-blank" or a "words that follow X" type of thing. Sometimes, identifying the weirdest words on the board helps you isolate the more straightforward ones.
The Impact on the Gaming Community
It’s weird to think of a word puzzle as a "gaming" event, but that’s what Connections has become. It’s a social experience. When a puzzle is particularly difficult or has a funny word string like Bishop Burns Pope Lorde, it creates a collective moment of frustration and then, eventually, education.
People were actually googling Alexander Pope and Elizabeth Bishop that day. In a weird way, the NYT managed to trick millions of people into doing a quick literature review. That’s the power of a well-designed game. It takes something as "boring" as a list of poets and makes it a viral sensation because of the context it's placed in.
Actionable Next Steps:
- Diversify your word associations: When playing Connections, try to think of at least three different meanings for every word on the board before you click anything.
- Check for Surnames: If a word seems like a common title (like Bishop or Pope), immediately check if it’s also a famous person’s last name.
- Study the "Wyna Style": The puzzle editor loves using "hidden" categories where the words are actually parts of a larger phrase or have a shared prefix/suffix. If the obvious link isn't working, look for a more structural one.
- Don't Rush: Unlike Wordle, there is no "time" pressure on Connections. Let the words sit for an hour. Often, the real connection only jumps out once you’ve stopped looking at the board so intensely.