The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Monday's New York Times Connections puzzle mixed gymnastics equipment, wintry imagery and online shopping icons into a grid that puzzle trackers say leaned heavily on red herrings, tripping up players who committed too early to the wrong groupings. Here's a full breakdown of today's puzzle, along with hints for anyone still working through it.

How Connections works

Connections, one of the Times' most popular daily word games alongside Wordle, presents players with 16 words or short phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a connection — sometimes a straightforward category, other times a wordplay trick or shared cultural reference — and the puzzle rates each group by difficulty using color coding: yellow for the most straightforward group, followed by green, then blue, and finally purple for the trickiest and most conceptual connection. The game resets daily at midnight in each player's local time zone.

Today's category hints

For players who want a nudge before seeing the full solution, today's puzzle broke down as follows. The yellow group centered on equipment used in artistic and athletic gymnastics. The green group involved objects that all narrow down to a point, evoking a similar visual shape despite coming from very different contexts. The blue group gathered different types of "shifts," a word that can apply to everything from work schedules to physics phenomena to broader conceptual changes. The purple group, as usual the hardest of the four, focused on symbols commonly found at the top of an online shopping website or app.

A puzzle built on red herrings

Multiple puzzle trackers flagged today's grid as unusually loaded with misdirection. Several words appeared to point toward an obvious pairing that turned out to be a trap. Forbes contributor Kris Holt noted the trickiest of these directly, pointing out the wordplay built into the top row of the grid. "The top line tickled me, as it literally put the CART before the HORSE," Holt wrote, describing how the puzzle deliberately placed words evoking the familiar idiom next to each other to tempt solvers into an incorrect grouping. Coverage from The Gamer echoed the same warning for players working through the puzzle, cautioning, "Don't put the horse before the cart; separate them entirely!" and adding that solvers shouldn't be tempted to group CARROT or STICK with HORSE either, since that combination was also designed as a red herring.

Today's Connections answers

With the hints out of the way, here is the complete solution to Monday's puzzle, numbered 1,142 by the Times.

The yellow group — gymnastics apparatus — consisted of BEAM, HORSE, RINGS and VAULT.

The green group — long tapered things — consisted of CARROT, ICICLE, KNITTING NEEDLE and STALACTITE.

The blue group — kinds of shifts — consisted of DOPPLER, GRAVEYARD, PARADIGM and STICK.

The purple group — icons on a shopping site — consisted of BELL, CART, HEART and MAGNIFYING GLASS.

How the connections actually work

Each of today's categories carried a specific logic once solved. In the yellow group, the balance beam is used exclusively by female gymnasts in competition, while the pommel horse and still rings are used exclusively by male gymnasts; the vault, resembling a springboard-assisted table apparatus, is used by all competitors. The green group's connection was largely visual, tying together a carrot, an icicle, a knitting needle and a stalactite through their shared narrow, tapering shape. The blue group required recognizing that "Doppler shift," "graveyard shift," "paradigm shift" and "stick shift" are all established phrases using the word "shift" in distinct contexts, spanning physics, work schedules, conceptual change and manual transmissions. The purple group tied together four icons commonly found on retail websites and shopping apps: a bell representing notifications, a cart representing items selected for purchase, a heart representing a wishlist or favorites feature, and a magnifying glass representing the site's search function.

Where the red herrings caused the most trouble

According to Forbes' Holt, the trickiest part of the puzzle wasn't necessarily any single category but rather how convincingly the grid disguised its groupings early on. Holt described initially being drawn toward GRAVEYARD and PARADIGM as an entry point into the blue category, before realizing DOPPLER was the fourth word needed to complete it. The green category, by contrast, came together more intuitively once the shared tapering shape of ICICLE and STALACTITE became apparent. The purple category clicked into place last, once CART and HEART were recognized together as shopping-related icons rather than being scattered across other groupings tied to the horse-and-cart wordplay.

Strategy for future puzzles

Puzzle trackers who cover Connections daily generally recommend the same core approach: identify the group that feels most obvious first, since locking in a confident answer early reduces the number of remaining words to sort through. Today's puzzle offered a clear example of why that strategy matters, since committing too early to an intuitive-seeming pairing built around the "cart before the horse" idiom would have cost valuable guesses before the actual four groupings became clear.

Part of a growing puzzle lineup

Connections has become one of several daily games the Times uses to drive its Games subscription business, alongside Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword and the newer Connections: Sports Edition, which on Monday focused on football and hockey team names, Cincinnati-related identifiers and football played in Germany. The core Connections puzzle debuted in 2023 and has since built a dedicated daily following, with solvers frequently sharing their results using the game's colored emoji grid without revealing specific answers, a format that mirrors the viral sharing behavior that helped make Wordle a cultural phenomenon in the years prior.

For now, Monday's puzzle closes out as a strong test of pattern recognition, with red herrings built directly into the grid's structure rewarding players who resisted the temptation to lock in the first plausible grouping they spotted.

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