The NYT Connections puzzle for Sunday, July 12, 2026, is #1127. All four group answers are below.
Three spoiler-free hints come first for solvers still working through the board.
Hint 1: Two of today’s four categories connect to fruit – but in completely different ways. Getting them untangled early is the key to unlocking the whole puzzle.
Hint 2: One group contains only the names of fruit-flavored candy brands sold in movie theaters and corner stores. Think small, brightly packaged, hard.
Hint 3: The purple group has nothing to do with fruit or grammar. Each entry is the opening three letters of a U.S. state capital city. The cities are all well-known; the fragments are designed to look like ordinary words.
Yellow – Reproductive Part of Fruit
PIP, PIT, SEED, STONE
Green – Bit of Fruit-Flavored Candy
DOT, NERD, RUNT, SPREE
Blue – Verbs in a College Life Slogan
PARTY, REPEAT, SLEEP, STUDY
Purple – Starts of U.S. Capitals
DEN, MAD, PHO, SAC
The twin-fruit structure is the editorial centerpiece of today’s puzzle. Yellow and Green both pull from the same semantic neighborhood – fruit – but they operate at completely different levels of abstraction. Yellow is literal: PIP, PIT, SEED, and STONE are all words for the core or reproductive center of a piece of fruit. STONE is a peach stone, PIT a cherry pit, PIP an apple or grape pip, SEED the most general form of the same thing. Solvers confident about one group will find the words migrate too naturally between the two categories to commit without hesitation.
Green is a layer of misdirection above that: DOT, NERD, RUNT, and SPREE are fruit-flavored candy brands – Dots, Nerds, Runts, and Sprees – not parts of fruit at all. The category does not name a fruit or a fruit component; it names a candy. Parsing that distinction under time pressure, with RUNT and PIT both on the board looking equally like fruit-adjacent terms, is where most solvers will burn their early guesses.
The blue group is accessible once the fruit categories are cleared. PARTY, REPEAT, SLEEP, and STUDY are all verbs from the well-worn college-life slogan – eat, sleep, study, party, repeat – that has appeared on dormitory posters and orientation T-shirts for at least two decades. The puzzle uses the slogan without naming it, trusting solvers to retrieve the cultural reference from context. SLEEP and STUDY likely leave the board first; PARTY and REPEAT are the ones that keep solvers second-guessing whether a different frame fits better.
Purple – Starts of U.S. Capitals – is the structural trick saved for last. DEN opens Denver (Colorado), MAD opens Madison (Wisconsin), PHO opens Phoenix (Arizona), and SAC opens Sacramento (California). None of the four fragments looks like an abbreviation on first read. PHO scans immediately as the Vietnamese soup; SAC reads as a medical term; MAD might suggest anger before Madison occurs to anyone. The puzzle is betting that solvers never think to ask what longer word each fragment could begin.
Yesterday’s Connections puzzle (#1126, July 11, 2026) is solved in our July 11 answer guide. Sunday’s Wordle #1849 answer is also live. NYT Connections resets daily at midnight ET and is free to play at the New York Times Games site.
