The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Saturday's edition of the New York Times' Connections puzzle sent players on a tour spanning family vocabulary, African geography and a wordplay category that tripped up even some experienced solvers, blending straightforward category knowledge with a trickier structural twist by the time players reached the puzzle's toughest tier.

Connections, the Times' daily word-association game, challenges players to sort 16 words into four hidden groups of four, each color-coded by difficulty from yellow, generally the most straightforward, through green and blue to purple, typically the most conceptually demanding. Players are allowed up to four mistakes before the puzzle locks them out.

Here are the four categories for July 25

The yellow group, puzzle number 1,140's easiest tier, centered on Spanish words for family relatives, grouping ABUELA, HIJO, MADRE and PRIMO. In Spanish, abuela means grandmother, hijo means son, madre means mother, and primo means cousin, giving the category a straightforward theme for players with even basic familiarity with the language.

The green group carried the theme "Start to Cry, With 'Up,'" bringing together CHOKE, MIST, TEAR and WELL. Each of these words can be paired with "up" to form a phrase describing someone becoming emotional or beginning to cry, as in choke up, mist up, tear up or well up. Several solvers noted that WELL in particular was harder to place in this category than the other three words, since its more common associations, water sources or general wellness, made its connection to crying less immediately obvious.

The blue group asked players to identify African currencies, linking KWANZA, LEONE, NAIRA and RAND. The kwanza is the official currency of Angola, notably distinct from Kwanzaa, the unrelated annual cultural celebration observed in the United States. The leone serves as the official monetary unit of Sierra Leone, the naira is the legal tender of Nigeria, and the rand is the currency used in South Africa and several neighboring countries within the Common Monetary Area. Multiple solvers described this category as one of the toughest of the day, with several noting they recognized some of the underlying countries but hadn't realized the specific words functioned as currency names.

The purple group, traditionally the puzzle's most difficult, followed the pattern "Strip ___," connecting CLUB, MALL, POKER and STEAK. Each word completes a common two-word phrase when paired with "strip": strip club, strip mall, strip poker and strip steak. Notably, several solvers found this category more approachable than the currency-based blue group, despite its purple ranking, since the wordplay pattern became apparent relatively quickly once a couple of the pairings clicked into place.

A puzzle that flipped the usual difficulty curve

Several puzzle commentators noted that Saturday's edition subverted the typical expectation that purple categories are always the hardest to solve. One reviewer described completing the puzzle without any mistakes but noted that the blue African currencies category proved more challenging in practice than the purple strip-word category, despite blue traditionally ranking as the second-most difficult tier. That reviewer specifically credited recognizing Sierra Leone and South Africa as countries with helping crack the currency group, while acknowledging limited prior familiarity with kwanza and naira specifically as currency names.

Other players reported similar struggles working through the Spanish relatives category if they lacked language familiarity, with abuela and madre proving more recognizable to English-speaking solvers than hijo and primo, which some players initially considered for other possible groupings before settling on the correct category.

How Connections works

Connections has grown into one of the Times' most popular daily offerings since its official 2023 launch, building on the success of Wordle, which the Times acquired the previous year. Unlike Wordle's single daily answer, Connections rewards players who can identify conceptual overlaps between words that initially appear unrelated, a format that has helped make it a fixture of daily routines and group chats since its debut.

Puzzle strategy generally favors locking in the category a solver feels most confident about first, since an incorrect guess counts against the four-mistake limit regardless of which category it targets. Solvers who scan the full 16-word grid for potential overlaps between categories, rather than committing to an early hunch, tend to navigate trickier puzzles like Saturday's more successfully, particularly when a word could plausibly fit more than one theme.

Part of a broader puzzle lineup

Connections is one of several word and logic games the Times publishes daily, alongside Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword, Pips and Sudoku, some of which remain free to play while others require a Games subscription. The Times also produces a Sports Edition of Connections, built around athletics-themed vocabulary, which runs as a separate daily puzzle from the main edition.

A new Connections puzzle publishes at midnight local time in each time zone, meaning players in different parts of the world are often solving different day's puzzles depending on when they check in, a structural quirk that has become a familiar feature of how the game is discussed and shared across social media each day.

A new Connections puzzle will publish at midnight Sunday, continuing the daily format that has made the game one of the Times' most consistently engaging offerings since its debut. Players hoping to keep a personal win streak alive, or looking to avoid the kind of stumble that Saturday's African currency category caused for several solvers, can expect a fresh set of 16 words and four new categories waiting with tomorrow's reset, part of a format that continues to reward both broad general knowledge and careful, structural pattern recognition in equal measure.

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