Yellow group challenges highlight toppling and clumsiness with Fall, Spill, Tumble, and Wipeout.
Green and blue groups focus on books and folktale characters, requiring careful word linking.
Purple group uses candy-themed homophones, creating extra difficulty and clever misdirection for solvers.
The Sunday NYT Connections puzzle is a real brain-teaser as it introduces co-existing cleverness and frequently encountered themes at the same time. The game offers the categories of clumsiness, expressions of temper, book parts, and chocolate bars, incorporating both playful misdirection and revealing satisfying connections. It is a fun and a bit challenging approach to keeping the brain active this weekend.
NYT Connections is a daily word puzzle where players have to divide 16 words into four sets of four. These groups consist of words that share a common theme, but the connections might sometimes be confusing. Players can give a limited number of tries, and wrong guesses are added up.
The game employs color coding for showing how difficult it is, with yellow usually being the easiest, green and blue as medium, and purple as the hardest. NYT Connections offers a daily brain workout to fans of pattern recognition, wordplay, and logical thinking.
The 16 words for today’s NYT Connections puzzle are:
SPINE, BUG, MARSH, FREAK, JACKET, SKORT, COVER, FALL, FLIP, WIPEOUT, LEAVES, TUMBLE, DOVER, CRUNCHY, WIG, SPILL
Here are helpful hints for each color-coded group:
Yellow group – Words that describe what happens when clumsiness meets gravity
Blue group – Add “out” to each word to indicate losing control or temper
Green group – Terms related to reading a physical book, not digital formats
Purple group – Trick-or-treat themed chocolate bars with an extra letter
Yellow – Topple
Blue – Lose it With “OUT”
Green – Parts of a Book
Purple – Chocolate Bars Plus a Letter
Here are the correct groupings for today:
Yellow group – Fall, Spill, Tumble, Wipeout
Blue group – Bug, Flip, Freak, Wig
Green group – Cover, Jacket, Leaves, Spine
Purple group – Crunchy, Dover, Marsh, Skort
The Yellow and Blue groups were relatively straightforward. Words like Fall, Spill, Tumble, and Wipeout clearly indicate physical mishaps, while Bug, Flip, Freak, and Wig pair naturally with “out” to show loss of temper. The Green and Purple segments have taken a lot of time and effort to solve.
The Green words are referring to books in general and the physical parts like covers, jackets, spines, and leaves, whereas the Purple ones cleverly twist, linking chocolate bars with an extra letter and adding a seasonal trick-or-treat theme. The puzzle is simple in terms of the categories, but it can carry the players along through the twists and turns of the misdirection.
The NYT Connections puzzle of today has been remarkable because it has combined classic word patterns with modern-day subtlety and playfulness. The Yellow and Blue categories were the easiest ones to get quick wins, but the Green and Purple ones required thinking, and finally, knowledge of books and candy, respectively.
The solvers whose minds worked quickly could finish the whole puzzle through books and candy bar references; others might have lingered longer at the more difficult Purple group. The puzzle is also the creators' and players' test of skills in pattern recognition and lateral thinking, not to mention being a delightful Sunday challenge to the NYT Connections fans.