The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Monday's edition of The New York Times' popular word-grouping game leaned heavily on wordplay, with one category in particular designed to lure solvers toward a wrong answer hiding in plain sight. Here's a full breakdown of Connections #1114 for June 29, 2026, including hints for those still working through it and the complete answers for anyone ready to check their results.

What is Connections?

Launched in June 2023, Connections is one of the Times' newest puzzle hits, trailing only Wordle in popularity among the paper's daily games. The game, edited by Wyna Liu, presents players with 16 words or short phrases that must be sorted into four groups of four, each sharing a hidden category. Categories are color-coded by difficulty, typically running from yellow as the most straightforward, through green and blue, up to purple, which is generally reserved for the hardest grouping and often involves wordplay, hidden meanings or cultural references designed to mislead. Players are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the puzzle ends.

According to the Times' own guidance for tackling the puzzle, successful solvers tend to start with simple, undeniable sets, consider alternate meanings of ambiguous words, and watch for patterns in word endings or suffixes, all while staying flexible, since Liu is known for deliberately constructing categories that overlap in misleading ways.

Hints for each category

For players who want a nudge before seeing the full solution, here are hints for Monday's four groupings, presented from easiest to hardest.

The first category gathers old-fashioned terms for people who cause mischief or behave badly, the kind of words you might find describing a villain in a 19th-century novel.

The second category connects words describing the act of eating or drinking something quickly and with real enthusiasm.

The third category focuses on physical components found inside a piece of audio equipment used to produce sound.

The fourth and trickiest category hides its connection inside the words themselves, with each entry ending in a term associated with a different part of a tree.

The answers, category by category

The first group, gathering old-fashioned terms for troublemakers, consists of MISCREANT, ROGUE, RUFFIAN and SCOUNDREL. Solvers familiar with old novels or period dramas likely recognized this cluster of words quickly, even if one of the four words ultimately ended up causing confusion elsewhere on the board.

The second group, centered on eating or drinking with enthusiasm, includes CRUSH, GUZZLE, INHALE and SNARF. Multiple puzzle commentators noted a sense of familiarity with this particular grouping, suggesting a similar set of words describing enthusiastic consumption may have appeared in a past Connections puzzle.

The third group, focused on parts of a speaker, consists of CABINET, CONE, MAGNET and WOOFER. This category required some technical familiarity with audio equipment, since words like CABINET and CONE carry far more common everyday meanings that could easily pull solvers toward unrelated categories before the speaker-related connection became clear.

The fourth and most difficult group, the purple category, links EMBARK, GROOT, NUDIBRANCH and STRUNK under the theme "Ending in Parts of a Tree." Each word conceals a different tree component at its end: embARK hides "bark," nudiBRANCH hides "branch," STRUNK hides "trunk," and GROOT hides "root" — a clever bit of wordplay that had nothing to do with the popular Marvel character most players likely associated with the name at first glance.

Why this puzzle tripped up so many solvers

The purple category's reliance on a fictional character's name as a decoy proved to be the puzzle's central challenge. One columnist covering Monday's solve admitted to initially assuming GROOT belonged with a different, imagined category built around dog-related themes, pointing to WOOFER and EMBARK as words that seemed to support a canine connection before the actual "parts of a tree" theme became apparent.

That same columnist also acknowledged a related misstep, explaining that the word ROGUE was mistakenly grouped elsewhere based on a vague association with slang terminology, rather than being placed correctly among the other old-fashioned troublemaker terms, illustrating just how easily a single word's secondary meaning can derail an otherwise straightforward solve.

Strategy tips for tackling today's puzzle and beyond

Puzzle guides accompanying Monday's release reiterated several general strategies for approaching Connections more effectively. Players are generally advised to scan the board first for tight, well-defined categories, such as colors, numbers or other clearly bounded groupings, before attempting trickier categories. Watching for homophones, alternate definitions and unexpected suffix patterns is also commonly recommended, particularly once a player has exhausted the more obvious groupings and is left facing the board's remaining, more ambiguous words.

Saving the purple category for last remains a frequently cited piece of advice, since it can often be solved through process of elimination once the other three groups have been correctly identified, reducing the risk of being misled by a deliberately placed red herring like Monday's Marvel-adjacent entry.

Looking ahead

A new Connections puzzle goes live at midnight local time for each player's specific time zone, meaning solvers around the world are frequently working through different numbered puzzles depending on where they happen to be at any given moment. Players looking to keep their streaks alive can also find ongoing coverage of the Times' broader puzzle lineup, including Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword and the sports-themed Connections variant, each of which resets on its own midnight schedule and offers a distinct daily test of vocabulary, pattern recognition and lateral thinking.

For those who came up short on Monday's puzzle, Connections #1114 adds one more entry to a growing archive of daily grids, with Tuesday's edition, Puzzle #1115, set to bring an entirely new set of 16 words and four fresh categories for solvers to work through when the clock resets at midnight.

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