NYT Connections answers for Monday, July 20, 2026 (puzzle #1135) are below. The four groups span announcement verbs, digital UI elements, pearl associations, and a wordplay category built around hidden alcoholic drink names.
Yellow – Announce: BLARE, HERALD, SOUND, TRUMPET
Green – Things To Click: BUTTON, ICON, LINK, MENU
Blue – Associated With Pearls: BUBBLE TEA, OYSTER, SWINE, WISDOM
Purple – Starting With Alcoholic Beverages: ALEXA, MEADOW, PORTOBELLO, SAKES
Yellow is Monday’s cleanest group. BLARE, HERALD, SOUND, and TRUMPET all mean to announce loudly or publicly – with TRUMPET carrying the dual meaning of the brass instrument and the act of proclaiming something. SOUND is the most likely misfire: “sound the alarm” fits, but SOUND also belongs comfortably in audio or adjective contexts. Solvers who tested the announcement angle early had an advantage.
Green’s Things To Click is a precise UI vocabulary set: BUTTON, ICON, LINK, and MENU are the four standard clickable elements in a digital interface. The group rewards solvers who thought in interface terms rather than general meanings – MENU in particular spans restaurant, dropdown, and settings contexts, and LINK works in both the hypertext and chain-link sense.
Blue is the puzzle’s most satisfying group once it lands. BUBBLE TEA connects via the tapioca pearls in the drink; OYSTER is the animal that produces them; SWINE echoes the phrase “pearls before swine”; and WISDOM gives us “pearl of wisdom.” The red herring flagged in solver communities is PORTOBELLO – the mushroom is conspicuous and feels categorical, but it belongs in Purple. Solvers fixated on mushroom types risked burying their Blue solve.
Purple is Monday’s hardest category and the most elegant. Each word conceals an alcoholic drink at its start: ALEXA hides ALE, MEADOW hides MEAD (the honey wine), PORTOBELLO hides PORT (the fortified wine), and SAKES hides SAKE (the Japanese rice wine). The group requires solvers to think phonetically and sub-lexically – not about what the words mean, but about what sounds they open with.
For the rest of today’s puzzle lineup, see our guides for Wordle #1857 and NYT Strands #869.
