Hints
Today’s Connections is a four-category sprint through some pretty specific wordplay. If you felt like the puzzle was “friendly until it wasn’t,” that tracks: the purple set is famously sneaky, and the blue category leans on a well-known literary pattern.
If you want today’s NYT puzzle solving help without spoiling everything at once, here are group hints in order from easiest to toughest.
Yellow group (easiest): Mississippi travel.
Green group: Hoops superstars—specifically players with multiple MVP seasons.
Blue group: Think of the palindrome “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”
Purple group (tough): Woof! (Homophones of kinds of dogs, familiarly.)
As you work through, a useful strategy is to lock in one category early, then let that theme “prime” your brain for the next one—especially with palindrome-based sets, where one word can unlock the rest. If you’re looking for solver feedback after you finish, you can also run your attempt through the Connections score tools after playing.
Answers
Ready to see the full solutions? Here are today’s Connections answers by color.
Yellow group (Navigate through, as a river): cross, ford, traverse, wade.
Green group (Multi-time NBA MVPs): Bird, Curry, James, Jordan.
Blue group (Non-palindromic words in a famous palindrome): able, Elba, saw, was.
Purple group (Homophones of kinds of dogs, familiarly): ciao (chow), palm (pom), peek (Peke), Pitt (pit).
One last small tip: for the blue category, it helps to separate “palindrome structure” from “which tokens repeat.” The set isn’t asking you to find every repeated piece—it’s selecting the words that show up as part of that famous line, but aren’t themselves palindromic. That distinction is what makes the category feel sharper than it looks.
