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 Friday's edition, with hints and the complete solution for Connections game number 1,146.

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. Friday's puzzle blended physical actions, clever letter rearrangements and playful wordplay, according to coverage from multiple outlets that track the daily game, making it a puzzle that rewarded players willing to look past a word's most obvious meaning.

Friday's 16 words, presented here in alphabetical order so as not to give away any grouping, are: CHEERIOS, DAPPLE, DINOSAUR, FASHION, FUNGUS, GLEEK, JDATE, JOYSTICK, MODEL, MOLD, MUSHROOM, PLUMBER, PRINCESS, SHAPE, SLIME and SPEAR.

Players looking for hints before jumping to the full answer can use the following category descriptions to narrow their thinking. One group gathers characters and figures associated with the Super Mario video game franchise. A second group brings together verbs that all mean roughly the same thing: to form, build or bring something into a particular shape. A third group consists of words that each begin with a shorter word meaning merriment or joy, hidden at the very start of a longer word. The fourth and often trickiest group involves words formed by adding a single letter to the front of a common fruit's name.

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

The first category, gathering figures from the Super Mario franchise, includes DINOSAUR, MUSHROOM, PLUMBER and PRINCESS. Each word describes a well-known character type from the games without naming them directly: Yoshi as the dinosaur, the mushroom-shaped Toad characters, Mario himself working as a plumber, and Princess Peach as the recurring princess figure central to the series' storyline.

The second category, built around words meaning to construct or shape something, includes FASHION, MODEL, MOLD and SHAPE. All four words can function as verbs describing the act of forming or creating something, whether shaping clay, fashioning a garment, molding a material, or modeling an idea or object into its final form.

The third category, focused on words that begin with a hidden term for merriment, includes CHEERIOS, FUNGUS, GLEEK and JOYSTICK. Each word conceals a shorter synonym for happiness or delight at its start: CHEER within CHEERIOS, FUN within FUNGUS, GLEE within GLEEK, and JOY within JOYSTICK, a wordplay pattern that required players to look past each word's literal, everyday meaning.

The fourth and typically most challenging category, built around fruits hidden inside longer words with a single letter added at the front, includes DAPPLE, JDATE, SLIME and SPEAR. Each word conceals a fruit once its first letter is removed: APPLE within DAPPLE, DATE within JDATE, LIME within SLIME, and PEAR within SPEAR, a construction that likely proved the most difficult grouping for many solvers given how thoroughly the added letters obscure the underlying fruit names.

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 Friday's puzzle specifically noted that the overlap between the merriment-hidden-word category and the fruit-hidden-word category made early sorting especially important, since several words could plausibly seem to fit more than one theme before players identified the precise underlying pattern connecting each group.

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 Friday'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.

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