The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Fans of The New York Times' daily word-grouping puzzle can find help here for Saturday's edition, with hints and the complete solution for Connections game number 1,147.

Connections challenges players to sort 16 seemingly unrelated words into four groups of four, with each group sharing a hidden connection. The puzzle ranks its four categories by difficulty using a color system, from yellow, the most straightforward, through green and blue, up to purple, generally the trickiest and most conceptually layered grouping of the day. Saturday's puzzle blended everyday household objects, film industry knowledge, technical machining terminology and clever wordplay, according to coverage from multiple outlets that track the daily game.

Saturday's 16 words, presented here in alphabetical order so as not to give away any grouping, are: BALE, BORE, BOULEVARD, BUNDLE, COMFORTER, COUNTERSINK, DRILL, JORDAN, LOAFER, PHOENIX, REAM, ROLLS-ROYCE, SHAM, SHEET, THROW and WALTZ.

Players looking for hints before jumping to the full answer can use the following category descriptions to narrow their thinking. One group gathers items commonly associated with a made bed. A second group brings together surnames belonging to actors who have won an Academy Award sometime since 2010. A third group consists of technical terms describing different ways of creating or finishing a hole in a piece of material. The fourth and typically most conceptually layered group involves words that each begin with a term describing a shape or type of bread.

For those ready for the complete solution, here are Saturday's four groups and their associated words.

The yellow category, the most straightforward grouping of the day, gathers items associated with bedding: COMFORTER, SHAM, SHEET and THROW. Each word describes a common item found on or around a made bed, from the sheet laid closest to the mattress to the decorative throw sometimes draped across the foot of the bed.

The green category brings together the surnames of actors who have won an Academy Award since 2010: BALE, JORDAN, PHOENIX and WALTZ. The grouping references Christian Bale, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor in 2011 for "The Fighter"; Christoph Waltz, who won the same award in both 2010 and 2013; and Joaquin Phoenix, who won best actor in 2020 for "Joker."

The blue category, built around technical machining terminology, includes BORE, COUNTERSINK, DRILL and REAM. Each word describes a distinct method used in metalworking and manufacturing to create, enlarge or finish a hole in a workpiece, from the initial drilling of a hole to reaming it for precision and countersinking its edge to seat a fastener flush with the surface.

The purple category, generally the most difficult grouping of the day, gathers words that each begin with a term for a bread shape: BOULEVARD, BUNDLE, LOAFER and ROLLS-ROYCE. The wordplay hides "boule," a round loaf of bread, at the start of BOULEVARD; "bun" at the start of BUNDLE; "loaf" at the start of LOAFER; and "roll" at the start of ROLLS-ROYCE, a construction that likely proved the most challenging for many solvers given how thoroughly each longer word obscures its hidden bread reference.

Puzzle strategy guides commonly advise players to begin with the category they feel most confident about, since locking in an easier group early can help clarify which words remain for the trickier, wordplay-driven categories later in a solve. Guides covering Saturday's puzzle specifically noted that the overlap between everyday words like LOAFER and BUNDLE, which could plausibly seem to belong to several different categories before the underlying bread-shape pattern became clear, made careful elimination especially important for maintaining an unbroken solve streak.

Connections remains one of several daily word games published by The New York Times, joining Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword and the newer Connections: Sports Edition, a themed spinoff applying the same grouping format to sports-related terminology. All of the Times' daily puzzle offerings typically reset at midnight local time, giving players a fresh challenge to tackle each day.

Players hoping to protect an ongoing daily streak, a feature Connections uses to track consecutive days of successful puzzle completion, can access Saturday's puzzle, along with archived puzzles from previous days, directly through the New York Times Games platform. For solvers who become stuck without wanting to reveal the full solution immediately, the Times and various puzzle-focused outlets typically offer tiered levels of hints, ranging from broad category descriptions to more specific clues, before revealing the complete answer for those who have exhausted their guesses or simply prefer to check their work against Saturday's finished grid.

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