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 Sunday's edition, with hints and the complete solution for Connections game number 1,148.

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. Sunday's puzzle relied heavily on misdirection, with several words appearing to fit obvious travel or conversational themes before revealing a very different underlying pattern, according to coverage from multiple outlets that track the daily game.

Sunday's 16 words, presented here in alphabetical order so as not to give away any grouping, are: À LA, ACTUALLY, AIRPLANE, ASEA, BEAST, BY, DARK, FLAX, LIKE, LORD, OLGA, PER, SO, THROUGH, VIA and WELL.

Players looking for hints before jumping to the full answer can use the following category descriptions to narrow their thinking. One group gathers common filler words people use in conversation that add little actual meaning beyond padding out a sentence. A second group brings together words and prepositions that all convey a similar idea: accomplishing something by a particular means or method. A third group consists of words that can each precede the same single word to describe a specific setting or state something is in. The fourth and typically most difficult group involves familiar three-letter airport codes with an extra letter added to the front.

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

The yellow category, the most straightforward grouping of the day, gathers common conversational filler words: ACTUALLY, LIKE, SO and WELL. Each word functions as a verbal filler commonly used in everyday speech, adding length to a sentence without necessarily contributing essential meaning, the kind of habitual word choice linguists often study as a feature of natural spoken conversation.

The green category, built around words meaning "by means of" or "through," includes BY, PER, THROUGH and VIA. Each word can be used to indicate the method or channel through which something is accomplished, as in phrases like "by hand," "per instructions," "through the mail" or "via email."

The blue category, focused on words that can each precede "mode" to describe a specific setting or state, includes À LA, AIRPLANE, BEAST and DARK. The wordplay connects each term to a common compound phrase: à la mode, referring to something served in a particular style, often with ice cream; airplane mode, the smartphone setting that disables wireless connectivity; beast mode, a colloquial phrase for an intensely focused or aggressive state; and dark mode, the display setting many apps and devices offer as an alternative to a standard bright interface.

The purple category, generally the most difficult grouping of the day, gathers familiar U.S. airport codes with an extra letter added at the start: ASEA, FLAX, LORD and OLGA. Each word conceals a well-known three-letter airport code once its first letter is removed: SEA, the code for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, within ASEA; LAX, the code for Los Angeles International Airport, within FLAX; ORD, the code for Chicago O'Hare International Airport, within LORD; and LGA, the code for LaGuardia Airport in New York, within OLGA.

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 Sunday's puzzle specifically warned players to watch for red herrings, noting that words like AIRPLANE and BEAST initially appear to fit travel or animal-related themes, while ACTUALLY and LIKE could easily be mistaken for a general conversational category, before the underlying "mode" and filler-word patterns become clear.

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 Sunday'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 Sunday's finished grid.

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