Connections Solver —
daily hints, groups & answers.

Field guide

How to solve NYT Connections.

Connections gives you a 4×4 grid of sixteen words. Your job is to split them into the four groups of four that the puzzle’s editors had in mind — nothing more than that. It sounds simple, but the difficulty comes entirely from overlap: several words will plausibly fit two or three categories at once, and only one arrangement makes all four groups work simultaneously.

The four difficulty colors.

When you solve (or lose), each group is revealed in a color that signals how hard it was meant to be:

• 🟨 Yellow — the easiest, most literal grouping.
• 🟩 Green — a notch harder, still fairly direct.
• 🟦 Blue — requires a bit more lateral thinking.
• 🟪 Purple — the trickiest, almost always wordplay: words that share a hidden prefix or suffix, homophones, anagrams, or a “___ word” pattern.

A reliable instinct: if a set of four words looks obvious, it is probably not the trap. The purple group is engineered to be the last thing you see, so the words left over after you’ve found three groups often resolve the hardest one for you.

A step-by-step method that works.

1. Read all 16 first. Don’t commit to anything until you’ve scanned the whole board for themes.
2. Find candidate groups, not final ones. Mentally note every category you can see, even if some words appear in two.
3. Hunt the overlap words. The word that fits two groups is the puzzle’s hinge — figure out which group needs it more, and the rest fall into place.
4. Look for the wordplay group. If four words seem unrelated, test a “___ word” or “word ___” pattern, hidden words, or homophones.
5. Guess your most confident group first — but only after you can see all four, so a wrong overlap doesn’t cost you a life.

The interactive board above is built for exactly this method: enter the day’s sixteen words, select a candidate four, and group them into a colored row. Rearranging groups costs you nothing here, so you can test arrangements freely before you commit a real guess.

Using graduated hints instead of the full answer.

Most players don’t want the whole solution handed to them — they want the smallest nudge that gets them unstuck. That’s why the Daily Hints panel reveals the puzzle in three stages:

• Categories — just the four group names, so you know what you’re looking for without knowing which words go where.
• Starter words — one confirmed word per group, the classic “give me a foothold” hint.
• Full solution — every group revealed in its official color, for when you just want to check or move on.

A short history of the puzzle.

Connections launched in The New York Times Games section in mid-2023 and quickly became one of its most-played puzzles, second only to Wordle. Its appeal is the same daily, single-shot format — one new grid each day, shareable results, and a difficulty curve that rewards pattern recognition over vocabulary alone. Like Wordle, the social layer (comparing how cleanly you solved it) is a big part of the fun.

Related word puzzles

If you like Connections, the same lateral-thinking muscles power our Wordle Solver and Anagram Solver. For crossword-style clue filling, try the Crossword Helper.

Disclaimer

This tool is an independent fan creation and is not affiliated with, authorized, or endorsed by The New York Times Company. “Connections” and “The New York Times” are trademarks of their respective owner. Daily-hint data shown here is illustrative and provided for practice and demonstration only.