Monday, October 19, 2026 · #1226
Today's yellow group is seethe and the purple group is ending in birds.
Today's board, solved
All four groups
How today's puzzle plays
Yellow — SEETHE: BOIL, FUME, RAVE, STEAM.
Green — ALL TALK: BLATHER, GAS, HOT AIR, WIND.
Blue — "MC" THINGS AT MCDONALD'S: FLURRY, MUFFIN, NUGGETS, RIB.
Purple — ENDING IN BIRDS: ALIBIS, BALLOON, ESCROW, MOHAWK.
When two words feel interchangeable, only one of them belongs — test the group that has no spare candidate first.
Prefer to work it out? Try today's Connections hints, staged so you only see what you ask for.
All four groups are at the top of the page in the Times' tier order, yellow to purple, with every word, and the notes beneath them list each group and, when the purple title has a blank in it, the phrase the purple words complete. This half of the page is the standing guide: how Connections is built, why the purple group decides so many boards, and how to spend four mistakes so that they are not all spent on the same wrong idea.
How a Connections board is built
Sixteen words, four groups of four, one board per date. The groups are colour-coded after you solve them — yellow (labelled Straightforward in the game), green (Medium), blue (Difficult) and purple (Tricky) — and the tier is set by the editor, Wyna Liu, not by players. In her 2023 account of building the game, Liu wrote that overlapping items, words that fit more than one group, made a board harder more effectively than trivia did, and the game's How to Play panel warns players to watch for words that seem to belong to several categories. The game ends when the fourth mistake is used. A guess with three correct words gets a "One away..." message and still costs a mistake.
The game opened in beta on 12 June 2023, and its code numbers each puzzle as the days since then plus one, so puzzle #1,000 fell on 7 March 2026 and 11 October 2026 was #1,218. Every number on this site is that same number, the one on your share grid. The Times does not publish a difficulty rating for each board beyond the four tier labels.
Why purple decides everything
Liu designed purple as the wordplay tier, "a stand-alone puzzle incorporating a wordplay element", and the archive bears it out: in the 41 boards from 1 September to 11 October 2026, 36 purple titles named a letter or phrase trick and 5 described a meaning or pattern instead. Wordplay is hard because the mind sorts words by meaning first, and the purple words often fit a meaning group too. On 2 September, CORN, PRAIRIE, SALTY and TOP were purple (___ DOGS THAT AREN'T DOGS), but four more words on the same board — HUNTING, RESCUE, SAUSAGE, SHEEP — also went before DOG and made up blue.
So the practical rule is to look for the trick before guessing. Check whether words share a beginning or an ending, take the same word in front or behind, or contain a smaller word. If exactly four of them link, that is a strong candidate; if eight link, as on 2 September, the board has split one idea across two groups and the titles will turn on a distinction. The Connections helper lays out the spelling patterns on a pasted board without naming the groups, and the Connections guide catalogues the purple mechanisms from the archive.
The purple mechanisms, by frequency
Counted from the Times' purple titles for the 41 boards from 1 September to 11 October 2026.
| Mechanism | Example | How to spot it |
|---|---|---|
| Fill in the blank (12) | AIR ___: CONDITIONER, GUITAR, KISS, QUOTES (9 Oct) | Words with no shared meaning; try adding a word before or after each |
| Ending in a hidden word (10) | ENDING IN GAMBITS: EMPLOY, PATRICK, PERUSE, SYNTACTIC (11 Oct) | Read the last three to five letters |
| Starting with a hidden word (6) | STARTING WITH ABBREVIATED MATH FUNCTIONS: COS LETTUCE, LOG CABIN, SIN CITY, TAN LINE (19 Sep) | Read the first three to five letters |
| Letter added or removed (5) | SAUSAGES PLUS A LETTER: BORAT, CLINK, FRANK-N-FURTER, WIDENER (16 Sep) | A word that looks misspelled usually is, on purpose |
| Hidden inside or anagram (3) | PHRASES HIDING GREEK LETTERS: FREEZE TAG, HOME GAME, MODEL TANK, ORAL PHASE (29 Sep) | Run the letters across the space |
| Meaning or other (5) | THINGS THAT APPEAR AT THE END: CABOOSE, DECEMBER, DESSERT, EPILOGUE (15 Sep) | Four words that are each the last of something |
Spending the four mistakes
A mistake is information if it was a deliberate test and noise if it was a hope. The best first guess is a group with exactly four candidates on the board, because nothing else competes for those words. If a category has five or more candidates, guess the most specific semantic group you can see instead — the one with the narrowest category — since narrow groups leave the least room for an overlapping word. A "One away..." on a four-word guess is worth acting on immediately: swap out the word that also fits another group and try again, rather than moving to a different group and coming back.
Save the last mistake. With one left and eight words unsolved, there are 35 ways to split eight words into two groups of four, but most of them break a pair you are already sure of, and reading the eight for a letter trick will usually pick the right one. The fourth mistake ends the game, so on the last guess choose the split you can explain, not the one you feel best about.
Where today's groups come from
The four groups are published from the puzzle's own data at midnight Eastern by the pipeline on the editorial policy page; the boards the Times serves ahead of time are held back and released on their dates, never early. The tier order, the words and the category names are the Times'; the notes underneath are generated from the same data. If you would rather be nudged than told, the Connections hints page stages the same board — a generated clue per group, then the category name, then the words — so you reveal only what you ask for. Every past board is in the archive.
Yellow, green and blue: the groups you can see
Liu's description is the best guide to the three easier tiers. Yellow is meant as a foothold, the most straightforward category; green and blue were sorted by how much they lean on unfamiliar terms or trivia. The archive window shows the range: yellow titles such as CHEMICAL ELEMENTS, BREATH FRESHENERS and DECISIVE VICTORY; green titles such as SHADES OF RED, U.S. PRESIDENTS and KINDS OF CHAIRS; blue titles such as HORROR MOVIES, DODGE MODELS and FIRST WORDS OF PIXAR FILMS. Blue also borrowed purple's devices now and then — four blue titles had a blank in them, like ___ INN HOTELS on 6 October, one was a starting-with trick, STARTING WITH U.S. MUSEUMS on 3 October, and one was a sound trick, WORDS THAT SOUND LIKE TWO LETTERS on 13 September.
A reliable read of the board takes about a minute: count how many words fit each obvious category. Any category with exactly four is a good first guess. Any category with five or more is where the overlap is, and its extra word belongs to another group. Any word that fits nothing you can see is a candidate for the trick group, and the purple mechanisms above are how to find its three partners.
Reading the one-away message
"One away..." means three of your four words were a group and one was not, and it is the most useful message the game gives, provided you act on it correctly. Abandoning the group throws that information away. The better response is to identify which of the four words also fits another category — the How to Play panel warns that some words will — swap it for the most plausible replacement, and guess again. Two "One away..." messages on the same group with different swaps have told you which words are certain and narrowed the rest; after three mistakes, read the remaining words for a letter trick before the last guess.
The game's stats screen records your mistake distribution alongside wins and streaks, and two badges are worth knowing about: Perfect Puzzle, for a board with no mistakes, and Purple First, for solving the purple group before the others. The solved board at the top of this page, in the Times' tier order, is the quickest way to check afterwards which word was the overlap that cost you.
What a solved board teaches
The four groups at the top are in the Times' tier order, and reading them in that order is a small daily lesson in how the board was assembled. Yellow shows the category meant as a foothold. Green and blue show the categories that needed more knowledge. Purple shows the trick, and when its title has a blank the notes spell out the phrase the words complete. Reading a week of solved boards this way, before or after solving, is the most reliable way to stop losing at purple, because the same few title forms — starting with, ending in, fill in the blank — came round again and again in the archive.
Sources and further reading
Recent Connections answers
4 groups · yellow starts with “PLACES TO STORE CLOTHES”
View answer →4 groups · yellow starts with “DIGITAL NOTIFICATIONS”
View answer →4 groups · yellow starts with “SURFACE IMPERFECTIONS”
View answer →4 groups · yellow starts with “WAYS TO PRESERVE FOOD”
View answer →4 groups · yellow starts with “HINT”
View answer →4 groups · yellow starts with “DISCERNMENT”
View answer →Every past puzzle is in the Connections archive. New here? Start with the Connections guide.