Here are all four answers for the NYT Connections puzzle #1146 on July 31, 2026.
Yellow – CONSTRUCT: FASHION, MODEL, MOLD, SHAPE
Green – SUPER MARIO FIGURES: DINOSAUR, MUSHROOM, PLUMBER, PRINCESS
Blue – FRUITS PLUS STARTING LETTER: DAPPLE, JDATE, SLIME, SPEAR
Purple – STARTING WITH MERRIMENTS: CHEERIOS, FUNGUS, GLEEK, JOYSTICK
Hints for each group are below, followed by the full breakdown.
NYT Connections Hints – July 31, 2026
Yellow hint: Four verbs all meaning to give shape or form to something. One of them is also a word for a glamorous profession.
Green hint: Four words that describe characters or character types from the Super Mario universe, not by name but by what they are.
Blue hint: Remove the first letter from each word, and you get a fruit. The leftover words are not fruit names themselves.
Purple hint: Each word starts with a word meaning happiness, celebration, or delight. The merriment word is complete before the rest of the word begins.
Yellow – CONSTRUCT: FASHION, MODEL, MOLD, SHAPE
All four words are verbs meaning to create, form, or give structure to something: you fashion a piece of jewelry, model a figure from clay, mold a material into a form, shape an idea into a plan. The misdirection is in MODEL, which reads as a profession (runway model, role model, scale model) before it reads as a verb for constructing. FASHION has the same trap: the fashion industry meaning is the first association for most solvers, not the to-fashion-something meaning. Once the verb frame locks in, all four slots are obvious – but that frame takes a moment to find.
Green – SUPER MARIO FIGURES: DINOSAUR, MUSHROOM, PLUMBER, PRINCESS
Today’s green category describes Mario characters by their type or role rather than their names: Yoshi is a dinosaur, Toad is a mushroom character, Mario is a plumber, and Princess Peach is a princess. The difficulty is that none of the four words is a character name, which means solvers must know the franchise well enough to map generic nouns back to specific figures. MUSHROOM is the riskiest slot: it also appears in the Mushroom Kingdom setting itself, and solvers who know the lore may second-guess whether it fits the character category specifically. It does.
Blue – FRUITS PLUS STARTING LETTER: DAPPLE, JDATE, SLIME, SPEAR
This is the puzzle’s most elegant category. Strip the first letter from each word and a fruit appears: DAPPLE loses its D to reveal APPLE, JDATE loses its J to reveal DATE, SLIME loses its S to reveal LIME, and SPEAR loses its S to reveal PEAR. None of the four words is itself a fruit, which is the key misdirection: solvers looking for fruit names in the grid will not find them and may never consider that the fruits are embedded one letter in. SPEAR is the most disorienting because S-PEAR reads naturally as the weapon before the fruit inside it surfaces.
Purple – STARTING WITH MERRIMENTS: CHEERIOS, FUNGUS, GLEEK, JOYSTICK
Each purple word opens with a word for happiness or celebration: CHEERIOS starts with CHEER, FUNGUS starts with FUN, GLEEK starts with GLEE, and JOYSTICK starts with JOY. The merriment word is always complete at the point where the rest of the word begins, which makes the category precise rather than approximate. GLEEK is the hardest word to crack here: it is a real English word (a flash of saliva squirted between the teeth) and was also the informal name for fans of the TV series Glee, which means solvers may reach for several explanations before landing on the GLEE prefix. FUNGUS is equally disorienting because FUN embedded in a word for mold is the last place most people look for cheerfulness.
Two days ago, NYT Connections #1144 on July 29 sent VANILLA into the nondescript group and stacked BLACK, CHALK, CORK, and WHITE as classroom board types in the purple group. Before that, Connections #1143 on July 28 hid palindromic names inside four longer words and ranked above average in difficulty. Puzzle #1147 will be available at midnight on August 1, 2026.
