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Connections archive

Connections hands you sixteen words and asks for four groups of four. The difficulty is almost never the words themselves; it is the two or three that plausibly belong to more than one group. We publish a nudge for each color before naming the category, so one group can be broken open without spoiling the other three. Come back here when you want to know whether purple really was as unfair as it felt.

2 past days published, covering August 10, 2026 to August 11, 2026. Each page carries the full hint set and the answers in the open.

How Connections works

Sixteen words, four hidden groups of four, and four mistakes before the board locks. The groups are ranked by difficulty and colored for it: yellow is meant to be the gift, green and blue sit in the middle, and purple usually runs on wordplay rather than plain shared meaning. The overlap is deliberate. Two or three words will sit comfortably in a group they do not belong to until the right split appears and takes them back.

What a dated page holds

Every past day lists all four groups: the category worded exactly as the Times worded it, the color it was assigned, the nudge we published that morning, and the four words underneath. Setting the nudge beside the answer it was pointing at is the honest test of whether it was a fair push or a giveaway.

What builds up here

Read a run of days and the editor's habits start to surface: how often purple turns out to be a homophone set, how often a category hangs on one word doing double duty, and which of the four colors is really causing the mistakes. None of that is visible from inside a single board, where every group looks equally plausible until it does not.

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