The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

NEW YORK — Wednesday's edition of The New York Times' Connections puzzle sent players hunting through categories spanning long-held feelings, frog species, sitcom surnames and a clever wordplay twist built around different ways of saying yes, in a grid puzzle columnists described as blending straightforward associations with several deliberate opportunities for misdirection.

Connections, published daily by the Times as part of its expanding suite of word games, presents 16 words or phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a common theme, and the puzzle is color-coded by difficulty, with yellow generally representing the most straightforward category and purple the most challenging. Players are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends.

Wednesday's puzzle, numbered 1158, organized its 16 entries into four categories: words meaning to hold onto or sustain a feeling, types of frogs, surnames from NBC sitcom characters, and phrases that each begin with a different way of expressing agreement.

The yellow group, typically the easiest of the four, centered on words meaning to preserve or sustain a feeling over an extended period, in the sense of nursing a grudge. It included "foster," "harbor," "maintain" and "nurse," four verbs that all describe holding onto an emotion longer than might otherwise feel natural. Puzzle commentary noted this category rewarded players who thought conceptually about feelings and emotional states, rather than searching for a more literal or physical connection among the words.

The green group asked players to identify different types of frogs, linking "bull," "green," "poison dart" and "tree." Commentators flagged this category as one with a built-in trap for unwary solvers, since "green" could easily be mistaken for a color-related clue rather than recognized as referring to the green frog species native to eastern North America. The bullfrog, meanwhile, was noted as a large species considered invasive in many parts of the world, while the poison dart frog was highlighted for its vivid coloration, a trait tied to toxicity levels that vary based on the frog's diet in the wild.

The blue category proved to be one of the tougher groupings for many solvers, requiring familiarity with a specific set of NBC sitcom characters. It grouped "Benes," "Bing," "Lemon" and "Scott," each a surname belonging to a character from a different NBC comedy series. Puzzle columnists described this group as particularly difficult for anyone not well versed in the specific shows being referenced, since none of the surnames carried an obvious thematic connection without that background knowledge.

The fourth and most difficult category, marked purple, hinged on a piece of wordplay built around different expressions of agreement. It linked "fine print," "goodbye," "great white" and "Okayama," with each entry beginning with a distinct way of saying yes: fine, good, great and okay, respectively. Puzzle analysts singled this group out as the day's most cleverly constructed category, noting that solvers needed to look past the literal meaning of each phrase (a legal document's small text, a farewell, a shark species and a Japanese city) to spot the shared linguistic pattern hidden at the start of each entry.

Connections has become one of the most closely followed entries in the Times' games lineup since its 2023 launch, following the runaway success of Wordle, which the Times acquired the previous year. The puzzle rewards lateral thinking over straightforward vocabulary knowledge, since individual words can often plausibly belong to more than one category, a design choice intended to create red herrings that complicate early guesses. Puzzle strategists commonly recommend that solvers lock in categories they feel confident about early, then examine the remaining words for structural patterns or shared cultural references, a strategy that proved particularly useful for untangling Wednesday's purple wordplay category.

Wednesday's puzzle was written, like the rest of the Connections lineup, under the direction of the Times' crossword editor, Wyna Liu, who oversees the game's daily categories. The puzzle arrived alongside the Times' newer Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff produced in partnership with The Athletic that applies the same grouping format to sports-specific terminology, running each day alongside the standard puzzle rather than replacing it.

The Times does not disclose internal difficulty ratings for individual Connections puzzles, but outlets that publish daily hint columns generally rank each day's difficulty based on reader feedback and common patterns of mistakes. Wednesday's puzzle was described by several of those columns as moderately challenging overall, with the purple wordplay category and the NBC sitcom surnames in blue both singled out as the primary sources of difficulty, given their reliance on either lateral thinking or specific pop-culture knowledge rather than straightforward vocabulary.

Connections remains part of a broader daily routine for millions of puzzle enthusiasts who also complete Wordle, the Mini Crossword and Strands each morning, all of which reset at midnight in each player's local time zone. The four games have become a fixture of the Times' digital subscription strategy, with the company regularly citing engagement with its games portfolio as a driver of subscriber growth in its quarterly earnings reports.

Players who missed Wednesday's puzzle or want to revisit past solutions can access the Connections archive through the Times' Games app for subscribers with All Access or Games-specific subscriptions. A new Connections puzzle, along with a new Connections: Sports Edition, Wordle and Mini Crossword, will be published at midnight Thursday.

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