Sunday’s NYT Connections puzzle has arrived, and Puzzle #1092 is the kind of grid that punishes overconfidence at first glance. Sixteen words, four categories, four mistakes allowed, and the New York Times has once again engineered a board where the most obvious clusters are precisely the ones designed to cost you a life. If you are searching for Connections hints today, a nudge in the right direction, or the verified complete answers before your streak slips, this is the definitive guide for Sunday, June 7, 2026.
The Connections puzzle is built around a deceptively simple premise. You are shown 16 words arranged in a four-by-four grid and asked to sort them into four groups of four, each bound by a hidden shared theme. The categories escalate in difficulty from Yellow, the most accessible, through Green and Blue, to Purple, which demands lateral thinking, cultural fluency, or an ear for wordplay that goes well beyond standard vocabulary. A single wrong guess counts as a mistake, and four mistakes end the game. The full rules and game history are available on the NYT Connections guide at Eastern Herald, which covers everything from the mechanics to solving strategy.
Today’s Connections Words: The Full Grid for June 7, 2026
The 16 words on the board for Puzzle #1092 are:
GOSSAMER, SHEER, GAUZY, THIN, VOICE, STATE, EXPRESS, UTTER, TOTAL, LEVEL, GUT, TRASH, CORE, POP, WAVE, STEP
At first read, this grid feels almost generous. Several words carry obvious everyday meanings that seem to anchor obvious groupings. THIN and SHEER read as synonyms. VOICE and EXPRESS feel immediately connected to communication. TOTAL and LEVEL look like math or measurement. CORE and STEP feel like exercise instructions. Every single one of those instincts is a trap.
Connections Hints Today: Category Clues for Puzzle #1092
Before the full spoilers, here are strategic, spoiler-free hints calibrated to nudge without destroying the experience of solving. This approach mirrors the philosophy behind the June 3, 2026 puzzle breakdown, where category misdirection was similarly engineered into the grid’s surface layer.
Yellow Group Hint: Think about the quality of light passing through fabric. These words describe something you can almost see through.
Green Group Hint: These are all verbs that mean to put thoughts into spoken or written words. They belong to the same semantic family as “say,” “declare,” and “articulate.”
Blue Group Hint: These four words all mean to bring a structure down completely. Think demolition, not damage.
Purple Group Hint: These short words are not genres by themselves. They are suffixes: attach them to the end of another word, and you get a recognized style of music.
One critical warning before you commit: the word TOTAL will tempt you toward quantity or mathematics. It belongs nowhere near that family today. Similarly, WAVE reads like a physics term or a gesture, but its home in this puzzle is firmly inside the music world. The constructors built these decoys deliberately, and the June 7 grid is more dangerous than it first appears.
Strategy Notes: How to Approach Puzzle #1092
The Yellow group is the cleanest entry point. All four words describe translucent or semi-transparent fabric, a narrow enough concept that once you see it, there is no ambiguity. Lock that group first to clear the board and reduce the noise.
From there, the Green group rewards players who think in synonyms. VOICE, STATE, EXPRESS, and UTTER all mean to articulate something, but the challenge is that EXPRESS and STATE carry so many other meanings, including shipping, identity, and government, that the grouping feels unstable until you commit. Resist the temptation to place EXPRESS in a different cluster.
The Blue group is where most experienced solvers stumble. TOTAL, LEVEL, GUT, and TRASH all mean to demolish something completely, and the puzzle relies on the fact that none of those four words announces “demolition” on first contact. TOTAL reads like a sum. LEVEL reads like a flat surface. GUT reads like anatomy. TRASH reads like waste. The shared meaning, to completely destroy a structure, sits underneath every surface reading. This is exactly the kind of lateral semantic architecture that has defined the modern Connections game since its launch, as explored in the May 25 puzzle analysis, which noted how the game’s sophistication has compounded year over year since Wyna Liu first launched the beta in June 2023.
The Purple group is this Sunday’s sharpest challenge. CORE, POP, WAVE, and STEP are music genre suffixes: attach them after other words, and you get Hardcore, Synthpop, Synthwave, and Two-Step, among dozens of other recognized styles. The puzzle is not asking you to name a genre. It is asking you to recognize that each of these four short words functions as a suffix in the naming of musical movements. That abstraction is precisely what makes Purple the most difficult tier in the NYT Connections color hierarchy.
NYT Connections Answers Today: Full Solutions for June 7, 2026
Spoiler warning: complete answers for Puzzle #1092 follow below.
🟨 Yellow Group: Translucent, As Fabric
GOSSAMER, SHEER, GAUZY, THIN
The cleanest group on the board. All four words describe fabric or material that allows light to pass through it, what a textile designer or poet might call diaphanous. GOSSAMER is the most specific, evoking spider silk or weightless fabric. SHEER and GAUZY are common textile terms. THIN functions here in its descriptive fabric sense rather than its dimensional one.
🟩 Green Group: Speak
VOICE, STATE, EXPRESS, UTTER
Four verbs unified by the act of saying something. You can voice an opinion, state a fact, express a feeling, or utter a sound. The trap here is EXPRESS, which carries freight and emotion in equal measure, and STATE, which conjures geography and government before it conjures speech. The puzzle rewards the solver who strips both words back to their most fundamental verbal function.
🟦 Blue Group: Demolish
TOTAL, LEVEL, GUT, TRASH
Four words that share the meaning of complete destruction. You can total a car, level a building, gut a structure, or trash a room. None of these words announces its membership in this category on arrival, which is precisely the design intention. This is the group most likely to claim a mistake from solvers who filed TOTAL under quantity or LEVEL under geometry.
🟪 Purple Group: Music Genre Suffixes
CORE, POP, WAVE, STEP
The most abstract category in Puzzle #1092, and the one that will generate the most discussion across social media today. CORE completes Hardcore, Metalcore, Emocore. POP completes Synthpop, Electropop, Indie Pop. WAVE completes Synthwave, Darkwave, Chillwave, New Wave. STEP completes Two-Step, Quickstep, and numerous electronic subgenres. The category title is Music Genre Suffixes, and it represents the kind of puzzle architecture that separates the puzzle’s most loyal solvers from casual players. For context on how Sunday puzzles have tended toward this level of abstraction, the May 21 puzzle breakdown tracked a similar pattern in which the purple group demanded domain-specific cultural fluency rather than vocabulary alone.
How the Connections Game Works
For readers encountering the New York Times Connections puzzle for the first time, or returning after a break, the format is straightforward. The NYT Connections game presents 16 words in a randomized grid. Players select four words they believe share a common theme and submit the group. A correct answer removes those four words from the board. An incorrect guess counts as one of four allowed mistakes. The game ends when all four categories are correctly identified or when the fourth mistake is made. Each category is assigned a color: Yellow for easiest, Green for medium, Blue for hard, Purple for most difficult, though the board itself does not reveal which word belongs to which color until a correct group is submitted.
The puzzle was created by associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu and has become the second most played game in the New York Times Games catalog, behind only Wordle. New puzzles publish daily at midnight local time.
Recent NYT Connections Puzzles: Archive Links
If yesterday’s puzzle also gave you trouble, the full breakdown for Puzzle #1072 remains one of the stronger recent examples of how the game uses cross-domain construction featuring homophones, MLB teams, rupture verbs, and anagrams to force rapid cognitive switching between entirely different knowledge frameworks. For players who want to trace the editorial evolution of the puzzle over recent weeks, the May 15, 2026 puzzle analysis, in which the word WADE divided the board between swimming and basketball, remains one of the most instructive studies in how the NYT Connections constructors engineer category overlap.
Tomorrow’s puzzle resets at midnight. The streak is yours to protect.
