Last Updated: May 2026. Not affiliated with The New York Times Company, Hasbro, Zynga, or any game publisher. Word game names including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, and Scrabble are trademarks of their respective owners.

Connections Helper

Paste all 16 puzzle words, separated by commas, spaces, or new lines. Review the suggested relationships and repeated patterns to form your own four groups without revealing the answers.

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.

How to Use the Connections Helper

Copy all 16 words from today's Connections grid and paste them into the text box, separated by commas, spaces, or line breaks.
Check the uppercase word grid that appears below the text box to confirm all 16 words were captured correctly.
Review the three analysis panels: "Possible suffix patterns," "Possible prefix patterns," and "Words of the same length." Each panel groups words that share a structural feature, which is often, but not always, the basis of a hidden category.
Read the gold tip box for a reminder to consider secondary meanings before locking in a group, then return to the actual Connections game to submit your guess.

Worked Example

Say your 16 words include RUNNING, JUMPING, SINGING, and DANCING alongside FIRE, WORK, FLY, and PLACE. Pasting them into the helper flags RUNNING, JUMPING, SINGING, and DANCING in the suffix panel under "-ing," which looks like an obvious yellow group. Meanwhile FIRE, WORK, FLY, and PLACE do not share a suffix or a length, but a human solver would notice they can each follow the word "FIRE" is wrong, instead each can precede "PLACE" (FIREPLACE, WORKPLACE) or follow "PLACE" in other combos, which is the kind of wordplay the tool cannot detect on its own. This shows why the helper surfaces structure while you still supply the meaning.

Reading the Puzzle Like the Editors Do

Connections puzzles are built backward from a theme, not forward from random words. The editors pick a purple wordplay idea first, then a blue idea, then green, then yellow, and they intentionally choose overlap words that could plausibly sit in more than one group. When you get stuck, ask which word feels like it was placed specifically to trick you, that word is often the true purple or blue member wearing a yellow or green disguise.

Common Mistakes

Locking in the first obvious group of 4 without checking whether a stronger word for that category exists elsewhere on the board.
Ignoring capitalization or spacing clues, like a word that only makes sense as part of a two-word phrase.
Spending a mistake on purple before yellow and green are cleared, when more information would have made purple obvious.
Forgetting that a single word can have three or four plausible categories, and picking the first one that comes to mind instead of checking all 16 words together.

Looking for more word tools? Try the Anagram Solver or the Wordle Helper for other daily NYT-style puzzles.

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, such as job titles, colors, types of fruit, or 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.

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 official archive of past puzzles on the NYT site, though unofficial archives exist. The puzzle has been running since June 2023. Given the daily cadence, there are well over a thousand published puzzles by now, with the count growing by one every day.

Paste or type all 16 words from today's puzzle into the text box, separated by commas, spaces, or new lines. The tool automatically groups the words into three panels: possible shared suffixes, possible shared prefixes, and words that are the same length. These panels do not reveal the actual categories, they just surface structural clues you might otherwise miss while reading the grid.

The purple category is almost always wordplay-based rather than meaning-based. Common purple patterns include words that can all precede or follow the same word (like FIRE___ or ___BOX), homophones, hidden smaller words spelled inside each answer, or a specific pop-culture reference set. Because purple relies on a trick rather than a topic, reading the words aloud and looking for hidden substrings often works better than thinking about definitions.

Only guess a group once you are reasonably confident in all 4 words, since you only get 4 mistakes total. If you are stuck between two possible fourth words for an otherwise solid group, it is safer to solve a different group you are more sure about first. Clearing 4 words from the board often makes the remaining, uncertain group obvious by elimination.