Players looking for help with today's NYT Connections puzzle can find hints, category breakdowns and the complete solution below for game #1136, released Tuesday, July 21, 2026.

Connections, published daily by The New York Times, challenges players to sort a grid of 16 words into four distinct groups of four, with each group sharing a hidden theme or category. The game presents an added layer of difficulty because individual words can often plausibly fit into more than one potential grouping, meaning players must identify the specific connection the puzzle's creators intended rather than simply the most obvious pairing.

How Connections works

Each puzzle assigns its four groups a color, ranging from yellow, generally considered the most straightforward category, through green and blue, to purple, typically the most challenging and often built around wordplay, shared prefixes or suffixes, or more obscure thematic links. Players select four words they believe belong together and submit their guess, with the game confirming whether the selection is correct. Players are allowed up to four incorrect guesses before the puzzle ends, and the game will alert players when a guess is "one away" from being correct, offering a helpful nudge without fully revealing the intended grouping.

A new puzzle becomes available daily at midnight in each player's local time zone, meaning solvers in different parts of the world are often........

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