NYT Connections Hint -

NYT Connections Hint Today: Answers, Clues and Puzzle #1118 for Friday, 3 July 2026

If you are stuck on today’s NYT Connections puzzle, you are in good company. Puzzle #1118 mixes a straightforward feelings category with a sneaky wordplay group that catches out even regular players. Below you will find gentle hints first, then the full answers, so you can stop scrolling the moment you have what you need.

Quick Answer Snapshot

Today’s puzzle is Connections #1118, published on Friday, 3 July 2026. It has one easy category, one nostalgic slang category, one everyday phrase category, and one wordplay category built around a single sound. If you only have thirty seconds, here is what to know before you scroll further.

Today’s Puzzle Number and Date

Connections #1118 went live at midnight in your local time zone. The puzzle refreshes once every 24 hours, so if the words below do not match what is on your screen, you are probably looking at a different day’s grid. Check the date shown in your NYT Games app against 3 July 2026 to be sure.

Today’s Difficulty Rating

Based on how the categories overlap, I would put this one at 3 out of 5. The yellow and green groups are quick wins, but the purple group is built to trick you into filling it with words that actually belong in blue. That kind of overlap is what pushes the difficulty up, even though none of the individual words are obscure.

How Many Hints You’ll Get Below

You will get three levels of help here. First, a short category hint with no words given away. Second, a single clue word for each group. Third, the full answers with an explanation of why each word belongs where it does. Stop at whichever level gets you unstuck.

Spoiler-Free Category Hints

These hints describe the theme of each group without naming any of the 16 words, so you can still solve the puzzle yourself.

Yellow Category Hint

This group is about feeling genuinely good. Every word here describes a warm, contented state of mind rather than a fleeting moment of fun.

Green Category Hint

Think of things people used to say when they were impressed or pleased, back before modern slang took over. These phrases have a distinctly retro, laid-back feel.

Blue Category Hint

Every item in this group is something you would not want someone to do to you. They are all phrases built around the idea of treating someone unkindly or unfairly.

Purple Category Hint

This is the wordplay group. Every word in this category can be read out loud in a way that sounds like a single letter of the alphabet.

What Makes Today’s Purple Group Tricky

The purple category shares a word that feels like it belongs in blue. One of the four purple answers looks, at first glance, like something unpleasant you would associate with unkind behaviour towards someone else. Only once you notice the sound connection does it become clear the word is doing double duty. This is the same trick the puzzle’s editor, Wyna Liu, uses often: a word that fits neatly into a wrong category on the surface, but only truly belongs in one place once you spot the hidden pattern.

One-Word Clue for Each Group

If the hints above were not quite enough, here is one extra clue word per category before the full reveal.

Category	One-word clue
Yellow	Contentment
Green	Approval
Blue	Unkindness
Purple	Tea

Today’s NYT Connections Answers

Spoilers from this point on. Here are the full answers for puzzle #1118.

Yellow Group Answer

Positive Feelings: Bliss, Happiness, Warm Fuzzies, Felicity

Green Group Answer

Retro Expressions Of Approval: Cool Beans, Groovy, Right On, Far Out

Blue Group Answer

Bad Things To Give Someone: Dirty Look, Cold Shoulder, Hard Time, Runaround

Purple Group Answer

What Things Pronounced “T” Might Refer To: Hot Drink, Golf Accessory, Shirt, Gossip

Category Theme Names Explained

The purple group is the one worth unpacking. Hot Drink is tea in its literal sense. Golf Accessory is a tee, the small peg golfers use to raise the ball. Shirt refers to a tee, short for T-shirt. Gossip is the odd one out at first glance, but it works because “tea” is a well-known piece of slang for juicy gossip, as in the phrase “spill the tea.” All four words are things you could call “T” out loud, even though they mean completely different objects and ideas.

How I Solved Today’s Puzzle

I want to walk through my own solving process, partly because it shows how the trap actually catches people, and partly because seeing someone else’s thinking often helps more than a bare answer key.

The Trap I Almost Fell For

I spotted Gossip early and assumed it belonged with Dirty Look and Cold Shoulder, since spreading gossip about someone certainly counts as an unkind thing to do to them. I had three of my four blue words locked in within the first minute. The fourth word I reached for was Hot Drink, purely because nothing else on the board looked unkind. That would have been a mistake, since Hot Drink is tea, and tea belongs in the wordplay group, not the unkindness group.

The Word That Cracked It Open

Runaround is what saved me. “Giving someone the runaround” is a common phrase for stringing someone along or wasting their time on purpose, which is clearly unkind. Once I placed Runaround in blue instead of Hot Drink, I only needed three more blue-shaped words, and Dirty Look, Cold Shoulder, and Hard Time filled that gap cleanly. That left Hot Drink, Golf Accessory, Shirt, and Gossip together, and the “sounds like T” pattern became obvious straight away.

Yesterday’s NYT Connections Answers

If you are catching up after missing a day, yesterday’s puzzle, #1117 from Thursday, 2 July 2026, is available on our Connections archive page along with every past puzzle solution. Checking the archive is also a good way to practise spotting these wordplay traps before they show up again.

How to Play NYT Connections

If this is your first time seeing the puzzle, here is what you need to know before diving in.

Basic Rules

You are given 16 words arranged in a four-by-four grid. Your job is to sort them into four groups of four, where each group shares a hidden connection. You select four words you believe belong together and submit your guess. Correct groups lock into place and disappear from the grid. You are allowed four incorrect guesses before the puzzle ends.

What the Colours Mean

Each category is colour coded by difficulty. Yellow is the easiest, green is a little harder, blue is trickier still, and purple is the most difficult of the four. The colours are only revealed once you solve a group, so they cannot be used to skip ahead, but knowing the pattern helps you guess which category to attempt first.

Colourblind-Friendly Way to Read the Grid

If distinguishing yellow from green or blue from purple is difficult for you, do not rely on colour alone. The NYT Games app also displays each solved group in a fixed position, from easiest at the top to hardest at the bottom, once you succeed. A simpler workaround is to solve by theme confidence rather than colour: start with whichever group you are most certain about, regardless of what colour you expect it to be, since the puzzle does not penalise you for solving out of order.

What “One Away” Means

If you submit four words and three of them are correct, the game tells you that you are “one away.” This message only appears when you are extremely close, so treat it as a strong signal to swap out just one word rather than abandoning the whole guess.

When Does a New Connections Puzzle Come Out?

A new Connections puzzle appears once every 24 hours, and the timing depends entirely on your own device’s clock.

Midnight Local Time Reset Explained

The puzzle resets at midnight in whatever time zone your phone, tablet, or computer is set to. This is different from some other NYT Games, and it means two friends in different countries can be looking at completely different puzzles even though they both opened the app at the same real world moment.

Why Your Friend’s Puzzle Looks Different From Yours

If you are comparing notes with someone overseas and the words do not match, you are very likely just on different puzzle numbers. Someone in Sydney will get a new Connections grid many hours before someone in Los Angeles, purely because their midnight arrives first. Checking the puzzle number in the corner of the grid, rather than relying on the date alone, is the easiest way to confirm you are both talking about the same puzzle.

Connections Strategy: Tips to Improve Your Solve Rate

A few habits make a real difference to how often you solve the grid without using up all four mistakes.

Watch for Overlap Traps

Almost every difficult puzzle includes at least one word that looks like it belongs in a category other than its true one. Today’s Hot Drink and Runaround pairing is a good example. Before locking in a guess, ask whether any of your four words could plausibly fit somewhere else. If the answer is yes, hold off and look for a stronger four word combination first.

Save the Purple Group for Last

Purple groups are usually built on wordplay, puns, or a shared sound rather than a shared meaning. These are genuinely harder to spot early on, so it often pays to solve yellow, green, and blue first. Once three groups are gone, the remaining four words are purple by process of elimination, even if you never fully understood the connection.

Use the Shuffle Button to Spot Patterns

The shuffle button rearranges the grid without changing the words. This sounds like a small feature, but seeing the same words in a new order genuinely helps your brain notice connections it missed the first time. If you feel stuck, shuffle before you guess.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The most common mistake is guessing the four words with the most obvious shared meaning without checking whether a stronger, more specific connection exists elsewhere on the board. A close second is ignoring the “one away” message and changing more than one word at a time, which wastes the useful information the game just gave you. A third mistake is treating every unfamiliar phrase as automatically purple. Some genuinely tricky words belong in yellow or green simply because they are less common expressions, not because they involve wordplay.

Connections Hint FAQ

What is today’s Connections hint?

Today’s puzzle, #1118, has four categories: positive feelings, retro expressions of approval, bad things to give someone, and things that sound like the letter T. Full hints and answers for each are listed above.

How many mistakes can you make in Connections?

You are allowed four incorrect guesses in a single game. On your fifth mistake, the puzzle ends and reveals the remaining answers.

What do the colours mean in NYT Connections?

Yellow marks the easiest category, green is moderately easy, blue is moderately difficult, and purple is the hardest. The colours are revealed as you solve each group correctly.

Who creates NYT Connections?

Connections is edited by Wyna Liu, who has worked on puzzles at The New York Times since 2020. She oversees the daily category themes and the wordplay that makes the purple group tricky.

Is today’s Connections puzzle hard?

Puzzle #1118 sits around the middle of the difficulty scale. The yellow and green groups are approachable, but the purple group is built around a hidden sound pattern that catches out players who guess based on meaning alone.

Where can I find yesterday’s Connections answers?

Yesterday’s puzzle, #1117, along with every previous day’s solution, is available on our Connections archive page.

About NYT Connections

Connections is a New York Times word game built around spotting hidden relationships between 16 seemingly unrelated words.

Who Is Wyna Liu?

Wyna Liu is the puzzle editor behind Connections. She joined The New York Times puzzle team in 2020 and has become known for weaving misdirection into the purple category specifically, often through puns, double meanings, or shared sounds rather than shared topics.

When Did Connections Launch?

Connections began as a beta test on the New York Times website in June 2023 before being added to the NYT Games app roughly two months later. It has since become one of the publication’s most played daily puzzles alongside Wordle.

How Connections Differs From the Classic “Categories” Game

Connections shares its basic idea with the childhood game Categories, where players sort items into groups. The key difference is that Connections deliberately designs overlap between categories, so several words could plausibly fit more than one group. Classic Categories usually avoids that kind of ambiguity on purpose, which is exactly what makes Connections feel more like a puzzle than a simple sorting exercise.