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 each group’s hint stays hidden above until you ask.
How Connections works
Connections gives you 16 words. Sort them into four groups of four, where each group shares something: a meaning, a category, a hidden word or a phrase they all complete. The game allows four mistakes; when you are one word off a group, it tells you you are “one away”.
How to use this page
Under the heading is a hint card for each of the four groups, from yellow to purple. Choose Show hint to read what links the group, without its name or words. Choose Show the group to see its name and its four words. If you only want the answers, choose Show all four answers.
A hint points at the link without giving it away, so you can take one group at a time and keep the rest to work out for yourself.
The four colours
Every puzzle has one group of each colour. Yellow is the most direct link, then green and blue. Purple is the trickiest, and is often wordplay: a word hidden inside each word, or words that all go before or after the same word.
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.