Good morning, puzzle fans! It’s time for another round of Connections, the New York Times word game that asks you to sort 16 words or phrases into four hidden groups of four. Today’s edition — game #1122 — is a sneaky one, built around a classic board game, campus sports lingo, a sly wordplay trick, and a purple category that hides in plain sight. Whether you’re chasing a long streak or just stopping by for your daily brain teaser, this puzzle has a little bit of everything: pop culture, wordplay, and one genuinely clever misdirect that’s likely to cost a few people their perfect score.
Below, you’ll find everything you need — a refresher on how the game works, spoiler-free hints organized by difficulty, some strategic thinking on how to approach today’s grid, and finally the complete answers with explanations for why each group fits together. Take it at your own pace, and feel free to stop reading the moment you’ve got what you need.
Why Connections Has Become a Daily Ritual
Since its official launch by the New York Times in 2023, Connections has quickly become one of the paper’s most talked-about games, sitting right alongside Wordle and Spelling Bee in the daily puzzle rotation for millions of players. Part of its appeal is how deceptively simple it looks — just 16 words in a grid — paired with how genuinely tricky it can be to untangle. Puzzle editor Wyna Liu has built a reputation for constructing grids that reward lateral thinking, cultural literacy, and a healthy dose of skepticism about the “obvious” answer.
That skepticism matters, because Connections is built on misdirection. Words are deliberately chosen so that they could plausibly belong to more than one category. A word like LETTERMAN might make you think of late-night television, but the puzzle may actually be using it to mean a student athlete who’s earned a varsity letter. That’s the whole game: constant second-guessing, cross-referencing, and pattern recognition.
How Connections Works
If you’re new here: you’re given a 4×4 grid of words, phrases, or short terms. Your job is to find four groups of four that share something in common — a category, a theme, a shared prefix or suffix, anything. Categories are color-coded by difficulty, and the color coding itself is a hint about how hard each group will be to spot:
- 🟨 Yellow – easiest. Usually a straightforward category with an obvious shared theme.
- 🟩 Green – easy-medium. Slightly more specific or niche, but still fairly direct.
- 🟦 Blue – medium-hard. Often involves wordplay, a shared prefix/suffix, or knowledge of a specific topic.
- 🟪 Purple – trickiest, usually wordplay-based, puns, or hidden patterns within the words themselves rather than their meanings.
You get four strikes before the puzzle is over, so it pays to be cautious about words that seem to belong in more than one place — that’s usually intentional. The best strategy tends to be starting with the category you’re most confident about (even if it’s not yellow) and working outward from there, since locking in one correct group often makes the remaining words easier to parse.
Another useful habit: don’t commit to your first guess the instant you spot a pattern. If four words seem to fit a theme, take a second look at the remaining twelve and make sure there isn’t a more specific version of that same theme hiding among them. Puzzle constructors love planting a “too easy” answer that’s actually a decoy for the real yellow or green category.
If you’re new here: you’re given a 4×4 grid of words. Your job is to find four groups of four that share something in common — a category, a theme, a shared prefix or suffix, anything. Categories are color-coded by difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow – easiest
- 🟩 Green – easy-medium
- 🟦 Blue – medium-hard
- 🟪 Purple – trickiest, usually wordplay-based
You get four strikes before the puzzle is over, so it pays to be cautious about words that seem to belong in more than one place — that’s usually intentional.
Today’s 16 Words
Here’s what you’re working with today:
PLOT, DISCOUNT, JOCK, COLBERT, LETTERMAN, FRENCH, LEMON, KITCHEN, BERNIE, HALL, OLIVER, TEAM CAPTAIN, STUDY, SAN ANSELMO, ALL-AMERICAN, CONSERVATORY
Hints (No Spoilers Yet)
Want a nudge before you see the full answer? Here you go, category by category, ordered from easiest to hardest the way the puzzle itself is designed:
- 🟨 Yellow: Think board games — specifically, one where you’re solving a murder. If you’ve ever accused Colonel Mustard of anything, this category should click fast.
- 🟩 Green: These are all labels you might hear used for a standout school athlete — the kind of terms that show up on a varsity jacket or in a yearbook superlative.
- 🟦 Blue: Each of these words can be followed by the same single word to make a common phrase, title, or hairstyle. Try adding a word that means “sudden turn” to each one and see what happens.
- 🟪 Purple: This one’s about endings, not beginnings. Don’t look at what each word means — look at its last four or five letters. A certain furry, felt-covered neighborhood might come to mind once you isolate the tail end of each entry.
A quick word of caution before you dive back in: today’s grid has at least one genuine trap. LETTERMAN is sitting right there looking like it belongs with talk-show hosts, and COLBERT is doing the exact same thing. If your brain immediately wants to build a “late-night TV hosts” category, resist that urge — it’s a deliberate red herring, and neither word is used that way today.
If you’re still stuck after these hints, here’s one more level of help: try reading each word backwards, or at least reading just its final syllable out loud. That’s the trick that unlocks the purple group, and once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.
Sometimes stepping away from the puzzle for thirty seconds is all it takes to spot the pattern you were missing. If you’ve been staring at the same four “leftover” words for a few minutes with no luck, it’s usually a sign that one of your earlier three groups is subtly wrong — even if you haven’t submitted it yet.
Spoiler warning: full answers are below. Don’t scroll further if you want to solve it yourself first!
Today’s Answers
🟨 Yellow: Rooms In Clue
CONSERVATORY, HALL, KITCHEN, STUDY
If you’ve ever played the classic whodunit board game, these will look familiar — they’re all rooms where Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, and the rest of the cast might have met their untimely end.
🟩 Green: Student-Athlete Designations
ALL-AMERICAN, JOCK, LETTERMAN, TEAM CAPTAIN
All four are titles or labels tied to being a standout athlete in school. Watch out for LETTERMAN specifically — it’s easy to assume it belongs with late-night TV hosts, but here it refers to a student who’s earned a varsity letter, not David Letterman.
🟦 Blue: ___ Twist
FRENCH, LEMON, OLIVER, PLOT
Add “twist” to the end of each of these and you get a real phrase or title: French twist (a hairstyle), lemon twist (a garnish or a gymnastics move), Oliver Twist (the Dickens novel), and plot twist (a narrative surprise).
🟪 Purple: Ending In “Sesame Street” Characters
BERNIE, COLBERT, DISCOUNT, SAN ANSELMO
This is the category built to trip you up. Look at the tail end of each word:
- BERNIE → ends in ERNIE
- COLBERT → ends in BERT
- DISCOUNT → ends in COUNT
- SAN ANSELMO → ends in ELMO
Four Sesame Street icons — Ernie, Bert, Count von Count, and Elmo — hiding in plain sight inside ordinary-looking words and names. It’s a great example of why Connections rewards looking at letters, not just meanings.
Final Thoughts
Today’s puzzle earns a solid “hard” rating. The Clue rooms and sports labels are gettable early, but that purple group is a genuine trap — DISCOUNT and SAN ANSELMO don’t scream “Sesame Street” until you isolate the final syllables. If you went in expecting Bernie Sanders references or a California city, you weren’t alone. This is exactly the kind of lateral thinking that makes Connections satisfying once it clicks.
Come back tomorrow for the next set of hints and answers, and good luck keeping that streak alive!
