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Today’s NYT Connections features clever pairings of real-life and cartoon duos, blending humor and nostalgia.
The Yellow and Green groups rely on logical word associations, while the Blue and Purple require pop culture recall.
Puzzle #874 strikes a balanced difficulty, offering an easier yet satisfying challenge after the Halloween edition.
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle takes a calmer turn after Halloween’s playful chaos. While the ghosts and pumpkins are gone, the November 1 grid brings clever pairings and a satisfying logic that long-time players will appreciate. It’s a moderate puzzle overall - light on misdirection but rich in symmetry, with two groups that link in surprising ways.
NYT Connections is among the daily puzzles that The New York Times provides, and it is the most popular among readers. In this game, there are 16 words (or phrases) that have to be put into four groups of four. Every group has a connection - either a theme, a phrase, or a category.
The groups are marked with colors according to their difficulty level:
Yellow is typically the most direct.
Green calls for a little more logical thinking.
Blue is more oriented to cultural or linguistic knowledge.
Purple is more likely to contain complex wordplay or references to popular culture.
Every round gives three wrong guesses before the end of the game; every selection becomes crucial.
RAVEN, PINKY, CHIP, JET, INKY, ROCKY, FILE, CLYDE, HARDY, SUE, TELLER, CHARGE, INDICT, ITCHY, PITCH, CHER
Yellow Group – I object
Think about words connected to court or legal actions.
One-word hint: Courtroom
Green Group – Funeral vibes
Each of these terms represents a shade or description of black.
One-word hint: Color
Blue Group – ______ and [word]
Each answer is part of a famous real-life duo.
One-word hint: Partners
Purple Group – [word] and ______
These are characters that lead well-known cartoon pairings.
One-word hint: Cartoon
Yellow Group – Take to Court
CHARGE, FILE, INDICT, SUE
Green Group – Black
INKY, JET, PITCH, RAVEN
Blue Group – Second in a Famous Real-Life Duo
CHER, CLYDE, HARDY, TELLER
Purple Group – Rodents Who Are First in a Cartoon Duo
CHIP, ITCHY, PINKY, ROCKY
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle has a clever symmetry between the Blue and Purple groups. Both deal with famous duos, but from completely different worlds — one grounded in real life, the other in cartoons. The contrast between CHER and CHIP highlights how the game balances cultural nostalgia with word logic.
The Yellow group is quite normal, for they use legal terms that even most players can easily recognize. The Green team’s color scheme provides a nice misdirection that is both simple and effective, as words like RAVEN or JET might at first glance seem totally unrelated. In conclusion, the puzzle favors observation over lateral thinking.
The puzzle for November 1 is remarkable for its paired structure - two sets of duos nicely mirrored between reality and fiction. It is not as complicated as the Halloween grid, but it still offers the combination of culture, language, and intuition that is characteristic of NYT Connections. Those players who can spot the patterns in partnerships and nuances of meaning are likely to see today's puzzle as both easy and gratifying.
