Connections Answer Yesterday (October 19, 2026)

Missed the board entirely?

Connections loads the puzzle for the date on your device, so once your date changes the game's main screen moves on to the new board. The previous one does not disappear from the world; it simply stops being the puzzle the game opens with.

Everything you need to read it is above: the groups in order from yellow to purple, the words in each, and the category names exactly as the Times wrote them. If you want to try it before reading, cover the page with your hand from the first group down and work from the sixteen words alone.

The board also keeps a permanent page of its own in our archive, so a link to it still works next week. The Connections answer yesterday shown here is simply the newest of those pages, at an address that never changes.

What the colours were telling you

Each group's colour marks its tier, from yellow, the most straightforward link, to purple, the trickiest. On a finished board that order is useful: if you lost with one group left, it was very probably the blue or purple one, and its category name explains the link you could not see.

Purple names are worth reading slowly. They often describe wordplay rather than meaning — a hidden word, a sound, a letter change — so the four words can look unrelated until the name tells you which trick was used.

Two in-game messages are worth remembering when you look back. "One away..." appeared when three of your four picks belonged together, and the counter under the board showed "Mistakes Remaining" — four at the start. If you lost, those four mistakes went on words that fitted more than one group, and the solved board above shows which group each of them really belonged to.

Did a word carry over from the day before?

Almost never, in our records. Across the 49 pairs of consecutive boards from 1 September to 20 October 2026, exactly one word appeared on two days in a row, and it played a different role each time:

Reading a lost board backwards

If the Connections answer yesterday is one you lost, start from the group you never found, not the ones you did. Read its category name, then find its four words and ask where each of them went in your guesses. Usually one word was pulled into an earlier group, and that single swap is the whole story of the loss.

Next, look for the word you were most confident about in the wrong place. Boards are built with decoys: a word that suits a yellow-looking category on the surface but belongs to a wordplay group underneath. The tennis-shot VOLLEY in the table above is a fair example of how the same word can be ordinary one day and a letter-change trick the next.

Finally, count how many of your mistakes were "one away". Several one-away messages in a row mean the groups were right in outline and the decoy was the problem; mistakes without that message mean the category itself was misread. The two need different fixes next time.

Streaks after a missed day

The game's statistics panel shows Win %, Current Streak, Max Streak and a count of perfect puzzles. Keeping those numbers across devices needs a Times account, as the game's own prompt, quoted below, says.

A missed day and a lost day are different things in those statistics. Losing a board is a played game that counts against your win percentage; not playing at all is a gap in the run of days. Either way, the Connections answer yesterday above is the board in question, so you can at least see what it would have taken.

The game does not spell out, in the text we could read, whether solving an older board later repairs a broken streak. Check your statistics panel afterwards rather than assuming it does.

Access your Connections stats, streaks and badges with a free account.— Connections, The New York Times — in-game account prompt, read October 20, 2026

Ways to use the previous board

A solved board is a good practice sheet, because you already know where every word went:

• Hide the category names and sort the sixteen words again. If you can now see the purple group, ask what made it invisible the first time.
• Write down the decoy words — the ones that fitted two groups. They are the board's real design, and spotting them is most of the skill.
• Compare the order you solved in with the colour order. If you finished purple before yellow, the wordplay was the part you saw first.
• Read the purple category name and try to name two more words that would have fitted it.
• Say each category name out loud before looking at its words. Names like LOW LANDFORMS WITH A LETTER CHANGED describe a mechanism; if you can predict the words from the name, you have learned the trick.
• Notice which group you would have started with. Starting with the most obvious-looking group is natural, but on a board with a decoy it is often the group that costs the first mistake.

Today's board, and the hints for it

For the current puzzle, the Connections answer page has all four groups and the hint page stages nudges one tier at a time. Open the hint page first if you have not played yet: the answer page shows everything at once.

The two boards are independent. In our records a word carried from one day to the next only once in 49 pairs, so nothing about yesterday's groups narrows down today's, and there is no reason to study one before playing the other.

Where the board and its number come from

The words, groups and category names are taken from the New York Times' published daily Connections data and shown without rewording. Nothing on this page is guessed or reconstructed.

That includes the capital letters. The Times writes its category names in capitals, and the four words of each group appear in the order its data lists them, which is not necessarily the order you would have found them in.

The puzzle number is the one players see in the game. Connections No. 1 was the board of 12 June 2023, and the count goes up by one each day, so the previous board is always one below the current one. Every board we have published is listed by date and number in the Connections archive; the Times keeps its own playable Connections Archive in the game's menu, which its subscription offers promote.

Each board's data also names its editor. On all fifty boards from 1 September to 20 October 2026 in our archive, that was Wyna Liu, who introduced the game in the Times' own announcement in June 2023.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Connections answers

Every past puzzle is in the Connections archive. New here? Start with the Connections guide.