Connections Hint: Group Words Faster

DataForSEO Labs, sampled on October 1, 2026, recorded about 5.0 million monthly searches for connections hint, against 2.2 million for connections nyt. Most of those searches want a nudge, not a screenshot of the finished grid. This page is the method. The hints for today apply it to the current practice board.

Wyna Liu, who edits the official New York Times puzzle, described the game in the Times on June 26, 2023: it is about finding common threads between words, with four groups and no more than four mistakes. The beta opened on June 12, 2023, and the game joined the Times apps on August 28, 2023. The boards on this site use that same grid. They are written here, not copied from the Times.

Say the link, not the list

Sort the hint by how much of the category it gives away. The weakest useful hint is a domain: food, sports, grammar. The next strength is the pattern: each tile takes the same word in front. The strongest hint that is still a hint names the pattern exactly, such as "words before BOARD," and still leaves you to find which four tiles belong.

A bad hint is a category title plus the words. That is the answer row. If you are helping someone, stop one step earlier than feels polite. The solver should still have a choice to make.

Use the colors in order

Yellow is the group a careful reader can say out loud: seasons, oceans, dog breeds. Take it first. It removes four words that were pretending to belong to a harder set. Green is a real theme with one plausible outsider. Blue, on these practice boards, is often a missing word. Purple is spelling, sound, or a phrase whose anchor is not on the grid.

A worked example

Take eight words: basil, mint, drill, thyme, saw, dill, hammer, wrench. A domain hint is "kitchen and workshop." A sharper hint is "herbs" and "tools." The answer is the two lists. Notice that drill can mean a practice routine, which is the decoy. The hint does not need to mention drill. Once the herbs are gone, drill has only one home.

Scale that to sixteen words. The extra eight are there to build a second decoy, usually the purple set. On the October 18 practice board, fish sits beside metals and shapes until you notice it belongs with jelly, not with trout. A purple hint for that board says the same spread can sit in front of all four words. It does not say jellyfish.

What to do with one away

One away is information you paid a mistake for. Keep the three and change one. Do not reshuffle the whole idea. Write the three down if you need to, then scan the grid for a word that fits the same test. If you cannot say the test in one sentence, you do not have a group yet. You have a vibe, and a vibe is how the fourth mistake happens.

Already guessed means that exact set of four was submitted before. The board will not spend another mistake on it. Change at least one word.

When to shuffle

Shuffle after you have locked a group, or when two words are sitting side by side and dragging you into a false theme. Do not shuffle to avoid choosing. The grid has a fixed set of four answers. Moving the tiles does not create a fifth category.

If you want the official puzzle instead of a practice board, open New York Times Connections. The rules page on this site covers mistakes, colors, and the submit step. The hint archive holds a separate ladder for each dated practice board.