Paste today's 16 words — we'll surface patterns. We do not reveal answers.
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Connections Strategy Guide
The single most useful skill in Connections is resisting the obvious answer. The NYT puzzle is deliberately built to mislead you with words that seem to fit a category but actually belong somewhere else.
Take your 16 words and read them slowly. Say them out loud. Then ask: could any of these words be hiding a different meaning? A word that looks like a noun might be acting as a verb. A word that looks specific might be part of a phrase.
The purple group almost always involves wordplay. Look for words that can all precede or follow a single word. Look for words that are all hidden inside a longer phrase. Look for words that are all slang for the same thing.
Write down at least 2 possible categories before you commit to any guess.
The Four Difficulty Colors, Explained
How NYT Connections groups are ranked
Color
Difficulty
What it usually looks like
Yellow
Easiest
A plain category: colors, fruits, job titles
Green
Medium
A category with one misleading member
Blue
Hard
Secondary meanings, or a specific pop-culture set
Purple
Hardest
Wordplay: hidden words, or words that all precede or follow one word
What To Do When You Get "One Away"
"One away" means three of your four words are correct and one belongs somewhere else. Do not guess again immediately. Instead, take each of your four words in turn and ask which other group it could plausibly join. The word that fits a second category is almost always the intruder. Swap it for the strongest leftover word and try again.
If two of your words could each belong elsewhere, leave that group alone and solve a different one first. Every group you clear removes four words from the board and makes the remaining categories far easier to see.
Frequently Asked Questions
The NYT Connections puzzle gives you 16 words. You must sort them into 4 groups of 4 words each. Each group shares a hidden theme. The themes are color-coded by difficulty: yellow is easiest, green is medium, blue is hard, and purple is the hardest. You get 4 mistakes before the game ends. Words can belong to multiple categories by surface meaning, so the puzzle is designed to mislead you. The trick is finding the intended theme, not just any theme that works.
Start with the yellow group. It is the most straightforward. Look for the most obvious shared category — job titles, colors, types of fruit, words that follow a common word. After yellow, move to green. Avoid guessing purple first — it is usually built on wordplay, hidden meanings, or obscure cultural references that become obvious only after you clear the easier groups. If you have 4 words you are confident about, commit to them. One mistake is recoverable. Four mistakes ends the game.
NYT Connections is designed to mislead. The puzzle editor builds categories that overlap in surface meaning. For example, BASS could go in a music group (bass guitar) or a fish group (bass fish). The purple category often uses a hidden word pattern like 'things that can follow FIRE' or 'words that precede ICE'. The puzzle rewards lateral thinking over straightforward categorization.
'One away' means you submitted a group of 4 words and 3 of them were correct, but 1 was wrong and belongs in a different category. The game tells you this to prevent you from wasting a mistake when you are close. If you get 'one away,' swap out each of your 4 words one at a time and think about which one could fit into another category you have not found yet.
The NYT publishes one new Connections puzzle every day at midnight Eastern time. There is no archive of past puzzles accessible on the NYT site, though unofficial archives exist. The puzzle has been running since September 2023. As of June 2026, there are over 700 published puzzles.