Monday’s NYT Connections arrives on Memorial Day with the polite, almost casual energy of a long-weekend grid, sixteen short words that look approachable until the categories start pulling against each other. Puzzle #1079 for May 25, 2026, is the kind of board that rewards solvers who slow down for thirty extra seconds before tapping anything, because the easy-looking yellow group is the bait and the purple twist is where streaks quietly die.
The sixteen words on today’s nyt connections board were:
BROW, CAP, LID, CYA, WHIT, ATM, PIN, SPOT, LASH, LOL, SCRAP, SHIRT, STICKER, BALL, TIA and SHRED.
At first read the grid looks like a mash-up of a conference-table tote bag, a group chat after midnight and a beauty counter, which is precisely the misdirection the constructors are leaning into. Several words slot cleanly into more than one cluster, which is the signature of a Monday designed to feel friendly and play sharp.
How the connections game works for new players
For anyone arriving fresh, the connections game asks players to sort sixteen words into four groups of four, each tied together by a hidden theme. The four categories are color coded by difficulty: yellow is the easiest, green is medium, blue is harder, and purple is the trickiest, almost always involving wordplay, hidden phrases or grammar tricks rather than straight definitions. Players are allowed four mistakes before the puzzle ends, and a perfect solve keeps the streak alive that, for many readers, has become one of the most quietly competitive habits of the morning.
The connections puzzle refreshes at midnight in each player’s local time zone, and the free game is available through the official New York Times Games portal on desktop and mobile. The puzzle now sits second only to Wordle in daily engagement across the Times Games catalog, and its global audience continues to expand across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and India.
Connections hints today for puzzle #1079
If you only want a directional nudge before the full reveal, here are the four category hints for today’s grid, ordered from easiest to hardest, the way the puzzle itself is built.
Yellow group hint: A small amount of something, the kind of word a parent uses when handing over a tiny piece of dessert.
Green group hint: The freebies stacked on a folding table at every conference, trade show and company onboarding day.
Blue group hint: The shorthand your group chat fires off without thinking, the kind of three-letter cluster that has quietly replaced full sentences.
Purple group hint: Four words that all sit comfortably after the same three-letter body part. The category header gives the trick away once you spot it.
Yellow is the cleanest entry point if you trust your instincts. Purple is the one solvers should save for last, because two of its words look much more at home in the green cluster on first glance.
Spoiler warning before the connections answers today
The full reveal is in the next section. If you are still mid-solve and only wanted the hints, this is the line to stop at. Bookmark the page, finish the grid, and come back to compare notes. The verified categories and the complete sixteen-word breakdown follow immediately below.
NYT Connections answers today, May 25, 2026
Here are the verified four groups for puzzle #1079, color by color, exactly as the New York Times has confirmed them.
Yellow, Tiny Bit: SCRAP, SHRED, SPOT, WHIT.
Green, Common Swag Items: CAP, PIN, SHIRT, STICKER.
Blue, Texting Abbreviations: ATM, CYA, LOL, TIA.
Purple, Eye___: BALL, BROW, LASH, LID.
Yellow group, Tiny Bit, deconstructed
The yellow category gathers four small-quantity synonyms that English uses almost interchangeably, the kind of words that show up in cooking shows and apology texts. A SCRAP of paper, a SHRED of evidence, a SPOT of tea, and not a WHIT of difference. WHIT is the one that flags this group for veteran solvers, because it almost never appears outside this exact construction, “not a whit.” Once it locks into place, the other three follow within seconds.
The trap inside yellow is mild but real. SPOT also reads as a stain, a place, or a dog’s name, and SHRED looks more at home with paper than with portion size. The category label, Tiny Bit, is the cleanest read in the grid, which is why the New York Times keeps it as the entry-level cluster.
Green group, Common Swag Items, decoded
The green category is the most culturally specific of the four. CAP, PIN, SHIRT and STICKER are the four objects that every conference goody bag, startup welcome kit, and recruiting fair table in America has been distributing for the past two decades. Anyone who has ever attended a tech meetup, a college orientation or a brand activation recognizes the inventory instantly.
The misdirection inside green is structural. CAP could read as a limit, a bottle top, or the slang verb meaning to lie. PIN could read as a needle, a bowling target, or a security code. SHIRT and STICKER are the steady anchors that pull the other two into focus. Once you name the category as freebies rather than objects, the group resolves cleanly.
Blue group, Texting Abbreviations, explained
Blue is the demographic group of the day, the cluster that splits solvers neatly by age. ATM, CYA, LOL and TIA are four of the most common three-letter shortcuts in modern digital conversation. ATM stands for at the moment, CYA for see ya, LOL for laughing out loud, and TIA for thanks in advance. Anyone under thirty-five reads this group as native vocabulary. Anyone older reads it as a banking acronym, a body part, a laugh, and a woman’s name in Spanish, which is exactly the trap.
The single most dangerous decoy in this group is TIA, which sits inside the grid alongside BALL, LASH and LID and could easily get pulled into a body or beauty cluster. The category label, Texting Abbreviations, is what unlocks it. Once a solver reframes TIA as “thanks in advance” rather than “aunt,” the blue group snaps into place.
Purple group, Eye___, the trickiest twist
Purple is, as always, the category that wrecks streaks. The trick today is a simple compound-word pattern. Every word in the group is something that follows the word Eye to form a familiar compound noun. Eyeball, eyebrow, eyelash, eyelid. BALL, BROW, LASH and LID. Four short, ordinary words that share absolutely nothing on the surface, linked only by the three-letter prefix the puzzle never shows you.
The reason purple is so effective today is that three of its four words live comfortably inside other categories on first read. BALL looks like a sport. LID looks like a bottle top, which is to say, swag. BROW looks like a beauty product. LASH looks like a beauty product.
Why today’s connections puzzle is harder than it looks
On the difficulty curve, puzzle #1079 reads as moderate for Monday, lighter than the airport-terminal grid that defined Friday’s nyt connections hints board and softer than Sunday’s farmyard-and-protest puzzle. But it earns its difficulty through cross-category overlap rather than vocabulary. Almost every word in the grid has a plausible second home. SHIRT and CAP could pass for clothing. PIN could pass for an ATM code, which is itself one of the texting answers. LID and CAP overlap as bottle parts. BROW and LASH read instantly as beauty.
Connections strategy for tomorrow’s grid
The strategic lesson inside today’s puzzle is straightforward and worth carrying forward. When a Connections grid feels too friendly, identify the words that could plausibly belong to two or more categories and treat them as the puzzle’s center of gravity. BROW and LASH today are the perfect example, two words that look like green or yellow filler and actually anchor the purple twist.
The other durable habit is the prefix-and-suffix scan. Any time a Connections grid carries four short, plain English nouns with no obvious thematic link, the answer is almost always a hidden word, usually a body part, a color, an animal or a common verb, that sits silently in front of all four. Eye, fire, side, sun, ear and head are the most frequent culprits.
Recent connections puzzles, for context
For readers tracking continuity across the week, Sunday’s #1078 leaned on farm pens, picket-line verbs and a possessive-adjective twist, while Friday’s #1076 trapped players inside airport-terminal language and a name-homophone purple. The full breakdown of Sunday’s grid is available in our walkthrough of puzzle #1078, and Friday’s airport-themed solve sits inside the May 22 breakdown. Saturday’s Marvel-and-Star-Wars grid is unpacked in the May 23 analysis, and Wednesday’s stove-knob-and-movie puzzle lives in the May 20 archive. Readers new to the format will find the rules, color logic and solving habits laid out cleanly in the definitive guide to the game.
Players who solve the full New York Times Games slate every morning can also check today’s Wordle breakdown and the latest Strands solution, both of which are published alongside Connections each day. The official puzzle is hosted on the New York Times Games portal.
The state of the connections game in 2026
Connections has now passed its third anniversary since editor Wyna Liu launched the beta on June 12, 2023, and the gap between it and every imitator has only widened. The New York Times reports the puzzle as the second-most-played game in its catalog after Wordle, and the spin-off Connections Sports Edition, run through The Athletic, has matured from a Super Bowl debut into a durable daily ritual for sports fans. The Atlantic and other outlets has framed the format as the defining word-grouping game of the decade, and the audience now spans far beyond the original American crossword base.
Tomorrow’s grid drops at midnight local time. Come back for the full hints and answers to NYT Connections game #1080, the same way thousands of readers have been arriving every morning for nearly a year. Until then, the streak is yours to protect.
