NYT Connections #1,242 for Wednesday, November 4, 2026: its 16 words are 3 to 16 letters long, three of them are phrases of more than one word and the green and purple groups are fill-in-the-blanks. It rates 5/5 on our difficulty scale, harder than 99% of past puzzles. The groups run from yellow, the most direct, to purple, the trickiest, and their hints are above, one at a time.
How to use these hints
Connections gives you 16 words to sort into four groups of four. The groups run from yellow, the most direct, through green and blue to purple, the trickiest. Start with the group you’re closest to.
A nudge tells you how many words the group’s link is and its first letter. If that isn’t enough, the stronger hint shows the first letter and the length of each word in the link. Neither names a group’s words, so you still solve it yourself.
Our difficulty rating counts the cards in wordplay groups and the cards the New York Times has grouped, in other puzzles, with another group’s words: it measures how a puzzle is built, not how hard players found it.