Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times Connections puzzle lands as Puzzle #1094, and it is the kind of grid that feels warmly approachable right up until the purple category quietly dismantles your assumptions. The board balances sweetness and abstraction in equal measure, rewarding players who think in cultural shorthand rather than literal definitions. If you have not yet opened today’s puzzle, consider this your final spoiler warning.
For a full primer on how the game works, the Eastern Herald’s definitive guide to NYT Connections covers everything from the color-coded difficulty tiers to the psychological design principles behind the puzzle’s most disorienting categories.
How to Play NYT Connections
The Connections game presents players with 16 words arranged in a four-by-four grid. The objective is to identify four groups of four words, each sharing a hidden common thread. Categories are color-coded by difficulty: yellow is the most accessible, green sits in the middle range, blue escalates the challenge, and purple is the most demanding, often relying on niche slang, wordplay, or domain-specific knowledge. Players are permitted four mistakes before the game ends. One wrong move in the purple tier can be the difference between a clean solve and a broken streak.
The puzzle resets daily at midnight in your local time zone, and a new set of 16 words replaces the previous grid. Since its beta launch in June 2023, Connections has accumulated well over three billion plays and grown into the second-most-played game in the New York Times Games catalog, sitting just behind Wordle in overall engagement.
Today’s Connections Hints – June 9, 2026
Before the full answers appear below, here is a set of calibrated, spoiler-free hints for each category. These are designed to nudge your thinking without giving away the answer outright.
Yellow hint: Think of words that conjure purity, gentleness, and the kind of imagery you would find on a christening card or a nursery wall.
Green hint: These four words all describe something you are explicitly not supposed to share, give away, or disclose. One of them will ruin a movie. One of them will get you locked out of your accounts.
Blue hint: Each of these words or symbols is routinely rendered in a smaller, elevated font position when it appears in mathematical notation, legal text, or scientific writing.
Purple hint: These four words are all slang terms used by musicians and music insiders to refer to specific instruments. If you have ever hung around a jazz club or read old-school music journalism, at least two of them should ring familiar.
What Made Puzzle #1094 Tricky
The yellow and green categories sit at opposite ends of the emotional register, one soft and symbolic, the other transactional and practical, yet both managed to generate meaningful confusion. DOVE, for instance, carries associations beyond innocence: it is a soap brand, a chocolate brand, a peace symbol, and a verb meaning to plunge into water. The puzzle’s constructors are almost certainly aware of that ambiguity, and they lean into it.
The green category, centered on things you are not supposed to reveal, contains its own trap. SURPRISE belongs here in the sense of an undisclosed event, but the word also suggests astonishment and spontaneity, making it easy to dismiss as thematically unrelated to the more obviously guarded terms like PASSWORD and SECRET. SPOILER, meanwhile, is almost too on-the-nose given the puzzle format itself, which makes it counterintuitively easy to overlook.
The blue category is where Tuesday’s grid becomes genuinely demanding for players without a scientific or typographic background. ASTERISK and TRADEMARK are familiar as small elevated symbols in legal and marketing contexts. DEGREE appears routinely after a number as a temperature or angular measurement. EXPONENT, the mathematical concept of a number raised to a power, completes the set. The shared logic is that all four appear in superscript or as superscript-adjacent symbols in standard writing.
The purple category is the session’s most interesting construction. AXE, BONE, KEYS, and SKINS are all musician slang for specific instruments: a guitar, a trombone, a keyboard, and a drum kit, respectively. For players outside that cultural context, the category is nearly impenetrable without inference. AXE in particular tends to attract misdirection, given its more common association with a chopping tool or the body spray brand. The puzzle has deployed similar musician-vocabulary traps in previous weeks, including the May 25 puzzle, which featured the Connections Sports Edition framework alongside comparable domain-specific slang.
Red Herrings to Watch For
The board for June 9 is constructed with at least two deliberate traps worth naming explicitly. First, DOVE belongs to the yellow innocence group, not to any category associated with birds, flight, or the peace movement. Second, BONE will tempt players toward anatomy or even a Halloween aesthetic grouping, particularly when it sits near SKINS, which can evoke a similar Halloween or skeleton image. The puzzle is counting on that association to mislead. Trust the music angle, and both words snap into place.
NYT Connections Answers for June 9, 2026
Full spoilers follow. If you have not yet solved today’s puzzle, stop reading here.
Today’s puzzle continues the editorial trend of recent weeks, in which the New York Times Connections team has steadily increased the cultural specificity of purple categories while keeping the yellow group anchored to familiar, emotionally resonant imagery. The June 3 puzzle, for instance, used Disney princess wordplay at the purple tier, a structure that shares DNA with today’s musician slang construction.
Here are the complete, verified answers for NYT Connections Puzzle #1094:
🟡 Yellow: Symbols of Innocence
ANGEL, BABE, DOVE, LAMB
All four words evoke purity, youth, or gentleness in established cultural and religious iconography. ANGEL and LAMB carry strong biblical resonance. DOVE is a universal symbol of peace and the Holy Spirit. BABE, in this context, refers to an infant or a figure of endearing innocence rather than the 1995 film about a talking pig, though that association will have cost some players at least one guess.
🟢 Green: Things You’re Not Supposed to Reveal
PASSWORD, SECRET, SPOILER, SURPRISE
Each word describes information that is meant to remain undisclosed. PASSWORD and SECRET have obvious practical and figurative weight. SPOILER has a culturally specific modern meaning rooted in film, television, and, appropriately, puzzle coverage. SURPRISE functions here as a planned, concealed event, think a birthday party or a gift, rather than an emotion, which is the more common usage. That semantic double life makes it the category’s most dangerous word.
🔵 Blue: Things Represented in Superscript
ASTERISK, DEGREE, EXPONENT, TRADEMARK
In typography and notation, all four appear as raised, smaller characters. The degree symbol sits above the baseline after a number. The trademark symbol floats above a brand name. An asterisk often appears in superscript to indicate a footnote. An exponent is written above and to the right of its base number in mathematical expressions. This category rewards players with backgrounds in science, math, or legal writing.
🟣 Purple: Slang for Musical Instruments
AXE, BONE, KEYS, SKINS
Each word is established slang within music communities for a specific instrument. AXE refers to a guitar, a term that has been in circulation since at least the bebop era of the 1940s and remains common in rock and blues writing. BONE is shorthand for trombone, used widely in jazz circles. KEYS refers to any keyboard instrument, from a piano to a synthesizer. SKINS denotes a drum kit or the individual drum heads. For players who arrived at the purple tier with DOVE still unplaced, the category’s logic likely remained invisible until the reveal.
Solving Strategy for Puzzle #1094
The optimal entry point for today’s grid is the yellow category. ANGEL, BABE, DOVE, and LAMB share an emotional and symbolic quality that, once identified, removes four words and simplifies the remaining board considerably. From there, the green category becomes visible: PASSWORD, SECRET, SPOILER, and SURPRISE form a tight conceptual cluster once DOVE is no longer competing for attention.
The blue category requires more deliberate thinking. Players should ask which words on the remaining board might appear in a raised position in formal writing. ASTERISK and TRADEMARK are the most visually recognizable. DEGREE follows naturally. EXPONENT rounds out the group and confirms the logic.
The purple category should be treated as a process-of-elimination conclusion. If AXE, BONE, KEYS, and SKINS remain after the other three groups are confirmed, the musician slang framework becomes the only available explanation. Do not try to force purple before the board gives you room to work. The May 15 grid demonstrated precisely how costly it can be to commit to purple too early, when its accent-sensitive homophones sparked widespread frustration among players who overcorrected.
For those tracking the game’s longer patterns, the May 18 puzzle offers an instructive contrast: that edition leaned on homophones and MLB teams, a design philosophy centered on sound and cultural knowledge rather than visual typographic logic. Tuesday’s puzzle operates in a completely different register, which is precisely why a consistent daily solving habit, rather than a single clever strategy, remains the most reliable path to a clean streak.
Today’s puzzle resets at midnight. Tomorrow’s NYT Connections hints and answers will be published here with the same depth and verified accuracy.
