The NYT Connections puzzle for Monday, July 13, 2026, is #1128. All four group answers are below.
Three spoiler-free hints come first for solvers still working through the board.
Hint 1: Three words on today’s board – MUG, PUSS, and KISSER – all mean the same thing in slang. None of them belongs to the same category.
Hint 2: One group contains only famous fictional cats from film, television, and literature. All four are household names if you know the right stories.
Hint 3: The purple group is a wordplay category. Every entry begins with a word that means a quick kiss. The rest of the entry has nothing to do with romance.
Yellow – Interrogate
EXAMINE, GRILL, PUMP, QUESTION
Green – Things With Handles
BUCKET, DRAWER, MUG, UMBRELLA
Blue – Fictional Cats
FIGARO, PUSS, SALEM, TOM
Purple – Starting With Smooches
BUSSIN, KISSER, PECKISH, SMACKDOWN
The editorial centerpiece of today’s puzzle is the triple-face trap. MUG, PUSS, and KISSER are all informal English words for a person’s face – a mugshot, a sour puss, a smacker in the kisser. The puzzle has planted exactly three of them on the board to tempt solvers into grouping all three together. The fourth slot in a hypothetical face category never materializes because each word belongs somewhere else: MUG goes to Green (things with handles – a mug has a handle), PUSS goes to Blue (Puss in Boots, the fictional cat), and KISSER goes to Purple (starts with KISS, a word for a smooch).
The blue group – fictional cats – is the most accessible once the face misdirection is resisted. FIGARO is Geppetto’s kitten in Pinocchio. PUSS is the swashbuckling cat from Shrek and his own spin-off film. SALEM is the sarcastic black cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. TOM is the half of the Tom and Jerry duo who has spent decades failing to catch a mouse. All four are culturally prominent enough that solvers who see through the face trap should clear this group early.
Yellow – Interrogate – carries its own misdirection. GRILL and PUMP both belong here as synonyms for questioning someone intensely, but GRILL also has a handle (a grill pan), and PUMP also has a handle (a hand pump). The puzzle is betting that solvers who anchor on handles too early will pull GRILL or PUMP away from their correct category. EXAMINE and QUESTION anchor Yellow clearly enough that confident solvers should resist the cross-category pull.
Purple rewards knowledge of informal words with a kiss. BUSS, KISS, PECK, and SMACK are four distinct English words meaning a kiss or a quick lip-contact, and each one opens one of the purple entries: BUSSIN (slang for excellent food), KISSER (slang for face), PECKISH (slightly hungry), and SMACKDOWN (a decisive defeat or a wrestling event). The category title – Starting With Smooches – is the frame that makes the connection visible once seen. Before that, PECKISH and BUSSIN read as entirely unrelated words.
Yesterday’s Connections puzzle (#1127, July 12, 2026) is solved in our July 12 Connections answer guide. Monday’s Wordle #1850 answer is also live. NYT Connections resets daily at midnight ET.
