Thursday’s puzzle has the kind of grid that looks gentle right up until the purple category turns the board upside down. Connections puzzle number 1103 for June 18, 2026, mixes a workout class lineup with a trio of history’s most recognized peace activists, then closes with a wordplay trap that has already tripped up plenty of players this morning. If you came here for the connections hint today, the full connections answers today, or simply a clean breakdown of nyt connections before your streak slips away, this is the complete guide.
The New York Times Connections game asks players to sort sixteen words into four hidden groups of four. Categories run from yellow, the easiest, through green and blue, and finally purple, which is almost always built on a twist rather than a straightforward theme. Players get four mistakes before the puzzle ends, and the daily reset happens at midnight in each player’s own time zone.
Here is today’s board, as it appeared before sorting:
WREN, CARRIAGE, KING, PLIE, BARRE, BEARING, TUTU, ATTITUDE, MANDELA, PRESENCE, HAMM, BOOTCAMP, PILATES, JIGS, GANDHI, AEROBICS.
Spoiler warning:Â The hints below are gentle on purpose, and the full connection answers today sit further down the page for anyone who wants to confirm a guess rather than have it handed over.
Yellow hint: think about the kind of structured workout classes you would find posted on a gym schedule board.
Green hint: these words describe the way someone holds themselves, their posture, their air, the impression they leave when they walk into a room.
Blue hint: four names tied to nonviolent resistance and lasting social change, the kind of figures who show up in history textbooks and Nobel Peace Prize coverage alike.
Purple hint: start with a list of common hand tools, then quietly remove the final two letters from each one. What is left behind is the trap.
If the purple category still is not clicking, here is one more nudge. HAMM is not a name from a sitcom, and JIGS is not a dance. Both are tools with their last two letters lopped off, and the same logic applies to the other two purple words once the pattern reveals itself.
Today’s NYT Connections Answers, June 18, 2026
Today’s Connections answers, sorted by group:
🟡 Yellow Group: Fitness Class Types
AEROBICS, BARRE, BOOTCAMP, PILATES
These are four workout formats commonly listed on a studio’s class schedule, ranging from high-energy cardio circuits to the slow, controlled core work associated with barre and Pilates.
🟢 Green Group: Demeanor
ATTITUDE, BEARING, CARRIAGE, PRESENCE
Each word describes how a person carries themselves physically and emotionally, the quiet signal a posture or manner sends before a single word is spoken.
🔵 Blue Group: Peace Activists
GANDHI, KING, MANDELA, TUTU
Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu each led movements rooted in nonviolent resistance, and three of the four were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that work.
🟣 Purple Group: Tools Minus the Last Two Letters
HAMM, JIGS, PLIE, WREN
Add back the missing letters and the hidden tools appear: HAMMER, JIGSAW, PLIERS, and WRENCH. It is the kind of wordplay that puzzle editor Wyna Liu has leaned on again and again this year, hiding a familiar object in plain sight by simply trimming its ending.
Today’s grid rewarded players who resisted an early ballet trap. PLIE, BARRE, and TUTU all sit comfortably inside dance vocabulary, and it would have been easy to go looking for a fourth ballet term among the remaining twelve words before realizing PLIE actually belongs to the missing-letters purple group instead. That kind of overlap, where a word fits two plausible categories until the rest of the board forces a correction, is exactly the misdirection Connections is built around.
The yellow and green groups were the most approachable today, since fitness vocabulary and posture-related words rarely hide much beneath the surface. The real test came once BOOTCAMP and PILATES were locked in, leaving solvers to untangle whether BARRE belonged with the workout classes or with the dance terms still scattered across the board. Once that distinction clicked, the rest of the grid fell into place quickly.
For readers chasing a longer streak, the broader pattern across recent puzzles is worth noting. Categories built on missing or altered letters, rather than pure meaning, have shown up with increasing frequency this year, and they tend to be the ones that burn through a player’s four allowed mistakes the fastest. Treating an unfamiliar four-letter cluster as a possible wordplay trap, rather than assuming it is simply an unfamiliar word, is often the fastest way through a tricky purple category.
Connections was created by Wyna Liu and has grown into one of the Times’ most consistently popular games, sitting alongside Wordle, Strands, and the Mini Crossword as part of the paper’s daily puzzle lineup. Each title rewards a slightly different kind of thinking, but they share the same midnight reset and the same quiet pull that keeps millions of players returning before their morning coffee is finished.
Anyone who solved today’s board without losing a guess can consider it a clean Thursday. Anyone who fell into the ballet decoy, or who spent two guesses second-guessing PLIE, is in good company. That is precisely the kind of misdirection Wyna Liu’s puzzle desk specializes in, and it is exactly why millions of solvers keep coming back for one more grid tomorrow.
