NYT Connections Strategy: How to Spot Every Hidden Group

How Connections is structured

Connections gives you 16 words that sort into four hidden groups of four, and your job is to find all four groupings correctly. Each group has a difficulty color: yellow is the most straightforward, green and blue sit in the middle, and purple is the hardest, usually built around wordplay rather than a plain shared meaning. You're allowed four mistakes total across the whole puzzle, so guessing carelessly early can leave you with very little room to recover later.

Watch for red herrings

The puzzle deliberately includes words that seem to belong to one obvious group but actually belong to a different, less obvious one. A word that looks like a clear fit for a "types of fruit" group might actually belong in a wordplay group where it's being used for its sound or its hidden letters rather than its meaning. Before locking in a guess, ask whether the words you've grouped share a genuine, specific connection or just a surface-level resemblance — surface resemblance is exactly what the red herring is designed to exploit.

Wordplay patterns typical of purple

Purple groups tend to lean on patterns rather than plain categories, and a few show up often enough to watch for:

• Hidden words: each of the four words contains a smaller word hidden inside it, often spanning a letter boundary you wouldn't notice at a glance.
• Homophones: the four words sound like another set of words when read aloud, even though they're spelled differently.
• Fill-in-the-blank: each word can precede or follow the same word to form a common phrase, and the connection is that shared partner word rather than anything about the words themselves.

If a set of four words doesn't share an obvious topic but does share a letter pattern, a sound, or a common phrase partner, you're likely looking at the purple group.

Sorting by confidence, not color

Don't assume the group you're most confident about is yellow just because yellow is labeled easiest — plenty of solvers correctly spot a purple wordplay pattern before they land on a more ambiguous yellow category that has two or three plausible interpretations. Work through the words by how sure you are of each grouping, not by which color you expect it to be. Locking in your most confident group first, regardless of its eventual color, reduces the pool of words you're reasoning about for every group after it.

When to shuffle

If a category keeps looking obvious but you're stuck deciding which two of five candidate words belong together, shuffle the board. Shuffling doesn't change the groupings, but it breaks up the visual clustering that can make certain words seem linked simply because they're sitting near each other. A shuffle is worth using whenever your reasoning has stalled rather than sharpened over the last minute or two of staring at the same layout.

Using your four mistakes wisely

Four mistakes sounds generous, but it disappears fast if you guess on hunches. Save a guess for testing a genuine toss-up — a case where you've narrowed a word down to one of two plausible groups and need the feedback to decide — rather than spending it on a group you haven't actually reasoned through. If you're down to your last mistake and two groups remain unsolved with eight words between them, look again for a wordplay angle you might have missed on the harder-looking group before guessing, since a wrong guess at that point ends the puzzle.

A worked example round

Suppose the 16 words include DIAMOND, CLUB, HEART, and SPADE alongside RING, BOXING, TOWER, and ONION. At a glance, DIAMOND, CLUB, HEART, and SPADE look like an obvious "card suits" group — and they might be. But if RING, BOXING, TOWER, and ONION share a subtler connection, like all being things known for "layers" or things that surround something else, the puzzle may actually be using one of the suit words in a different group entirely, with a less obvious fifth candidate quietly filling the suits slot. The lesson isn't to distrust every obvious group, since plenty of them are exactly what they look like — it's to double-check that you have exactly four strong candidates for each category, and to be suspicious any time a group has five plausible words competing for four spots, since that's usually where a red herring is hiding.

Learning from your mistakes mid-puzzle

A wrong guess isn't just a lost attempt — it's information. If you guess four words and get told one doesn't belong, you now know something concrete: three of those words genuinely share a connection, and the fourth belongs somewhere else. Rather than replaying the same group with a random swap, think about what the other three words have in common more precisely, since that sharper definition will tell you which word doesn't fit and, often, hint at which category the leftover word actually belongs to instead.

Keep practicing

Connections rewards patience with the purple group and discipline with your mistake count more than raw vocabulary. Play today's puzzle on the Connections page, or switch gears with the daily Strands page or our Zip solver.