The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Friday's New York Times Connections puzzle sent players hunting through positive feelings, retro slang, passive-aggressive behaviors and a clever phonetic wordplay twist, delivering one of the more well-rounded and enjoyable grids of the week heading into the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Puzzle number 1,118 centered on four distinct themes that required a mix of vocabulary knowledge, cultural familiarity and lateral thinking about pronunciation. Here is a full breakdown of every category and every answer.

The yellow group, typically the most accessible of the four, gathered words representing positive feelings: BLISS, ELATION, FELICITY and JOY. All four words describe states of happiness or emotional wellbeing, making them relatively easy to identify once players recognized the shared theme, though FELICITY in particular may have initially appeared to belong to a different category given its less frequent usage in everyday conversation compared to its three groupmates.

The green group asked players to identify retro expressions of approval, a culturally specific category that required familiarity with dated slang: COOL BEANS, FAR OUT, GROOVY and RIGHT ON. All four phrases were more commonly heard in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and have since faded from mainstream use, though some players may still encounter them in casual speech, nostalgic media or as deliberate throwbacks in contemporary conversation.

The blue category grouped together bad things to give someone, connecting four phrases that share the structure of being delivered as an unkind or dismissive action: COLD SHOULDER, DIRTY LOOK, HARD TIME and RUNAROUND. To give someone the cold shoulder means to dismiss or ignore them. A dirty look involves scowling or expressing contempt nonverbally. Giving someone a hard time means making their life more difficult through harassment or persistent annoyance. The runaround describes sending someone from place to place without actually helping them resolve a problem.

The purple category, as is tradition with Connections, delivered the trickiest grouping of the four and the one most likely to trip up players who approached it too literally. The theme was things pronounced T might refer to, grouping together GOLF ACCESSORY, GOSSIP, HOT DRINK and SHIRT. Each of those phrases describes something that can be referred to by the single letter T spoken aloud. A golf tee is a golf accessory. Tea is both a hot drink and a slang term for gossip, particularly in internet and pop culture usage. And a T-shirt is a shirt. Players who recognized the phonetic angle early likely solved the category without much difficulty, while those who tried to find a literal thematic link between the four phrases would have struggled considerably longer.

The puzzle was edited by Wyna Liu, who has developed a reputation for designing categories that overlap and mislead, rewarding solvers who remain flexible rather than committing too early to groupings that seem obvious at first glance. Connections refreshes daily at midnight local time and remains free to play on the New York Times Games website and app.

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