NYT Games answers today: Connections, Wordle, Strands and Spelling Bee, with hints first

Today's NYT Games answers

Four games, two clocks

The Times games do not share a clock. Wordle, Connections and Strands each load the puzzle for your device's date, so they change at midnight in your own time zone — a player in California gets the new board three hours after a player in New York. Spelling Bee is different: its instructions say new puzzles are released daily at 3 a.m. Eastern, and yesterday's Bee stays live until then. HintSheet publishes the first three at midnight Eastern, on the Eastern date, and the Bee after its 3 a.m. release.

Hints before answers, by design

The most common complaint about puzzle answer sites is that they spoil the puzzle you only wanted a hint for. HintSheet's Times pages separate the two intents. The hints page for each game stages information from least to most revealing — for Connections, a short generated clue per group, then the group name, then the words; for Wordle, vowel count, then repeats, then three letter clues and the first letter, then the word; for Strands, the clue and word count, the spangram's length and first letter, then first letters — each behind a reveal you have to tap. The answer page shows everything at once with no clicks, for people who are done.

Nothing on a hints page is visible until you ask for it, and the answer is always the last reveal, never the first. If you land on an answer page by mistake, the hints page is linked from it.

How the four puzzles are built

Connections (edited by Wyna Liu) is four groups of four words, colour-coded from yellow (labelled Straightforward in the game) to purple (Tricky). Liu designed purple as the wordplay tier, and in the 41 boards from 1 September to 11 October 2026, 36 purple titles named a letter or phrase trick — starting with, ending in, fill in the blank. The Connections guide catalogues them.

Wordle (edited by Tracy Bennett since November 2022) is a five-letter word chosen by an editor; 15 of the 41 answers in the same window were not on the original answer list in the game's code, and none was a regular plural. The Wordle guide has the letter-frequency data and opener measurements, and the Wordle solver narrows a word list from what you've already tried.

Strands (also edited by Bennett) is a 6×8 letter grid filled completely by a spangram and a handful of theme words. The Strands guide covers the theme types and where the spangram runs — top to bottom on 10 of 41 recent boards, which an edge scan of the sides alone would miss.

Spelling Bee (edited by Sam Ezersky) is seven letters in a hive; make words of four or more using the centre letter. The game's page carries each day's full answer list, which is what HintSheet's answer pages show; the Spelling Bee guide explains the scoring, and the solver runs a broader dictionary search on any hive.

Where the answers come from and how they're checked

Each puzzle is read from the data the Times' own games load, and published here on the schedule above. Connections, Wordle and Strands come from the puzzle data nytimes.com serves for each date; Spelling Bee's words come from the answer list on the game's page. None of the four is transcribed by hand, and New York Times puzzles are never published before their date.

Every page shows the puzzle's date. Every puzzle number on this site is the one in the game's own share text, so you can match a page by number or by date. Past puzzles are in each game's archive, browsable by month.

What the Times publishes itself

The games point to the Times' own help. Connections links to a daily *Connections Companion* column, Wordle's menu links to *Wordle Review*, and Spelling Bee links to the Spelling Bee Forum and to an article of solving tips. Each game also has a How to Play panel with the rules, and the games have archive modes for past puzzles. What the Times doesn't do is lay out the patterns across many puzzles — how often purple is a starting-with trick, how many Wordle answers fall outside the old list, which edges the spangram touches. That is what the guides here try to add: the strategy and the counts, not just the answer.

A weekly rhythm worth knowing

The Times hasn't published a weekly difficulty schedule for any of the four. The Strands launch article said Tracy Bennett varies Wordle's difficulty within a week, without saying how. The clearest pattern in HintSheet's own data is Spelling Bee's: in the 40 hives from 1 September to 10 October 2026, the number of accepted words rose through the week, from 31 on Mondays to 63 on Sundays on average. With five or six hives per weekday that is a hint, not a rule — but if you keep a streak across all four, Sunday's Bee is the one to leave time for.

The Times' editors, and why it matters

Each game credits a named editor — Wyna Liu for Connections, Tracy Bennett for Wordle and for Strands, Sam Ezersky for Spelling Bee — and their choices are visible in the answers. Liu's purple titles in our six-week window were mostly letter tricks: 16 starting-with or ending-in groups and 12 fill-in-the-blanks out of 41. Bennett's Wordle answers in the same window included 15 words that were never on the original list, and no regular plurals. Ezersky's Bee accepted NAAN, ACAI and ROMCOM but rejected HAHA, TATA and the British ANAEMIC. The guides on this site are organised around those habits, with the counts behind each one.

Reader questions about NYT games

"Why is Wordle's answer different for my friend?" Time zones — Wordle, Connections and Strands change at local midnight. Compare dates, or Wordle's number (days since 19 June 2021).

"Is there an official archive?" The games have archive modes for past puzzles. HintSheet's archive lists every puzzle it has published since 1 September 2026, by date.

"Does the Times publish hints?" Yes — the Connections Companion and Wordle Review columns, and the Spelling Bee Forum, all linked from the games themselves.

How HintSheet's NYT pages are built

HintSheet's pages are built around one decision: keep the hints, the answer and the strategy apart. The hints page is hints only, staged. The answer page is the answer first. The strategy lives on the game's guide, once, rather than being re-typed daily. If you want a daily essay, other sites write one; if you want the answer or a single nudge, this is the shorter route.

The other feature is the boards. Connections is shown as the sixteen-word grid, solved in colour; Strands as the letter grid with every path traced and the spangram lit; Spelling Bee as the hive. They're drawn from the puzzle data rather than captured as screenshots, so they're sharp at any size.

A glossary of Times-games terms

Used across the four guides.

• Tier (Connections) — the colour-coded difficulty band of a group.
• One away (Connections) — three of four submitted words belong together.
• Spangram (Strands) — the theme-describing word spanning two opposite edges.
• Pangram (Spelling Bee) — a word using all seven letters.
• Genius / Queen Bee (Spelling Bee) — 70% of maximum score / every word.
• Hard mode (Wordle) — revealed hints must be used in later guesses.

Reader questions, second round

"Which NYT game has the most to find?" Spelling Bee by far: the Times' lists in our window ran from 18 to 79 words a day, against four groups in Connections and five to nine answers on a Strands board.

"Do the games share an account?" Stats and streaks are tied to a New York Times account when you're signed in, across the games.

"Why is Spelling Bee's list different on other sites?" Many sites build their list from a dictionary. HintSheet's answer pages use the list the game itself loads, which is why our solver — a dictionary search — finds far more words than the answer page.

"Is Sports Connections covered?" Not at present.

A month of Times games, by the numbers

Measured by HintSheet on the puzzles it published from 1 September to 11 October 2026 (Spelling Bee to 10 October).

Glossary, continued

A few more terms from the four guides.

• Register (Strands) — the kind of theme phrase: literal, punning, fill-in-the-blank, mechanism.
• Decoy (Connections) — a word that fits an obvious category but belongs to another group.
• Opener (Wordle) — the first guess; ROATE, RAISE, SLATE and TRACE all measure well on the answer list.
• Spangram First (Strands) — the game's own stat for boards where the spangram was the first word you found.

Playing all four in twenty minutes

A routine for people who keep four streaks. Wordle first, because it's quick and warms up the letter sense. Connections next while attention is fresh; read all sixteen before touching anything. Strands third; scan all four edges for the spangram, not just the sides. Spelling Bee last and open-ended: pangram, four-letter sweep, endings, then stop at Genius. The first three can fit in twenty minutes on a good day; the Bee takes as long as you let it. The hint pages here are built to be opened mid-game on a phone without spoiling the next puzzle.

The archive for each game

Every Times puzzle published here is in its game's archive, listed by month and date — for example the Connections board of 2 September 2026 (the eight DOG words), Wordle No. 1,901 (RULER) on the same day, and the Strands board COMETOLIGHT. Spelling Bee is filed by date. The archives are the quickest way to answer 'what was Tuesday's purple group' and, read in bulk, the best way to learn each editor's habits: a month of Connections purple groups makes the mechanism list on the guide concrete, and a month of Wordle answers makes the letter table real.

Corrections and the Times' own changes

If a puzzle on HintSheet ever disagrees with the game, the game wins. Reports of a mismatch go to the contact page and are checked against the Times' own puzzle data before anything is changed; the editorial policy describes how corrections are made and dated. Because every answer page is generated from the data the game itself loads, a mismatch usually means the Times changed the puzzle after it was captured, and the page is corrected to match.

Every NYT Games guide on HintSheet

• NYT Connections: rules, the four difficulty tiers, and a method for the purple group — NYT Connections explained: the 16-word board, the yellow-to-purple difficulty tiers, the recurring purple-group tricks, and a routine for solving without.
• Wordle answer, hints and solver — the numbers behind five letters and six guesses — Wordle answer today, staged hints, and a solver that ranks your next guess.
• NYT Strands: how the theme, the spangram and the hint system really work — NYT Strands explained: the 6×8 letter grid, how theme words and the spangram are laid out, how the three-word hint system works, and a way to read the theme.
• Spelling Bee answers, pangrams and the solver — plus the rules nobody reads — NYT Spelling Bee answers today with every word by length and the pangram, a solver for any hive, and the rules that decide which words count: the.

Other pillars: LinkedIn Games · Dle Games. Or go back to today's puzzle answers across every game.

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