NYT Connections Hint & AnswersPuzzle #1229 · October 22, 2026

Today's Connections hints give you a small clue about each group without revealing the full answers right away. You can use them when you're stuck but still want to solve the puzzle yourself.

The answers are the 16 words divided into four groups of four. If you need the full solution, check the answers section above to see all four groups and how the words connect.

Each Connections puzzle has 16 words. Your goal is to sort them into four groups of four based on a common connection.

There are four groups in every Connections puzzle, with four words in each group.

The colors show the general difficulty of each group. Yellow is usually the easiest, followed by Green, Blue, and Purple, which is typically the trickiest.

You can play for free on the official New York Times Games website. A new puzzle drops every day with a fresh set of 16 words to sort into four connected groups.

A new puzzle unlocks at midnight in your local time zone — so players around the world get their next puzzle based on their own midnight, not one global release time.

You get four incorrect guesses before the game ends. That's exactly why many players lean on a hint to confirm their thinking instead of guessing blind.

Not at all. Most players use a hint today just for a small nudge, not the full solution. Starting with hints instead of jumping to answers actually helps you get better at the game while keeping it fun.

No — they're both daily New York Times word games, but they work differently. Wordle has you guess one hidden 5-letter word in six tries. Connections gives you 16 words and asks you to sort them into four hidden categories. Same publisher, same one-puzzle-per-day format, completely different puzzle mechanic.

Yes. Every past puzzle stays available with the same hints, traps, and answers format — use the "Yesterday's Connections Hint" link near the top of the page, or browse the full archive to jump to any specific date.

Yes — Connections publishes a fresh puzzle every single day of the week, weekends included, with no breaks. Weekend puzzles don't follow a fixed difficulty pattern; some are easier, some are just as tricky as a weekday Purple.

A Connections hint is a clue that points you toward a possible relationship between words without revealing the complete solution — a direction to think in, not the answer itself. It's useful once you've studied the grid but can't quite pin down which words belong together.

Yes. Our hints are layered — start with the spoiler-free word and category clues, and only check the full answers section when you actually want them. Nothing reveals the solution automatically.

Purple tends to rely on wordplay, double meanings, or less obvious patterns rather than a straightforward shared meaning. Looking at each word from a different angle — not just its first, most literal meaning — is usually what cracks it.