The NYT Connections answers today, for Monday, August 24, 2026, solve puzzle #1170. The four groups are fish, words meaning principal, pro-wrestling jargon, and tennis terms with a letter sound stuck on the front.
The grid is built around one deliberate cruelty. ARCH, HEEL and SOLE are all parts of a foot, they sit in the same sixteen squares, and they belong to three different groups.
Connections Hints Today, August 24, 2026 (#1170)
- Yellow: four of these swim.
- Green: four ways of saying first in rank.
- Blue: vocabulary from a scripted sport.
- Purple: say each one aloud. A single letter of the alphabet is hiding at the front of a tennis word.
Connections Answers Today: All Four Groups (#1170)
- Yellow, Fish: MULLET, PIKE, SOLE, TANG
- Green, Principal: ARCH, CHIEF, MAIN, PRIME
- Blue, Pro-wrestling lingo: FACE, HEEL, JOBBER, KAYFABE
- Purple, Letter homophone plus tennis term: BESET, DESERVE, EX-LOVE, EYELET
The Purple Group Is the One Worth Reading Twice
Say them out loud and the trick appears. BESET is B plus SET. DESERVE is D plus SERVE. EYELET is I plus LET. EX-LOVE is X plus LOVE. Set, serve, let and love are four of the most basic words in tennis scoring, each wearing the name of a letter as a disguise.
EYELET is the hardest, because it is a real object with a real meaning and no obvious connection to a racket. EX-LOVE is the giveaway: it is the only entry in the grid with a hyphen, and once you see the X doing letter work rather than word work, the other three fall over.
Where Solvers Lose Puzzle #1170
On the foot. ARCH, HEEL and SOLE are three quarters of an anatomy group that does not exist, and the missing fourth is BALL, which is not in the grid but is exactly what the purple category is quietly about. That is a construction joke at the solver’s expense.
The second trap is MAIN. Wrestling has a main event, so MAIN reads as blue to anyone who has found FACE, HEEL and JOBBER and is hunting a fourth. It is green. KAYFABE rescues you, because it is unmistakably wrestling and belongs nowhere else.
Is Connections #1170 Hard?
The New York Times rates it 3.3 out of 5, and that reading feels fair. The vocabulary is easy and the misdirection is dense, which is the combination that produces one-mistake solves rather than losses.
What we cannot tell you is how many people solved it clean. The Times publishes no daily success distribution for Connections, so a difficulty score is an editorial judgment, including theirs.
Yesterday’s Connections answers turned on doubled vowels, another puzzle where the trick was in how the words sounded rather than what they meant.
Today’s other puzzles: Wordle #1892, Strands #904, the Mini Crossword and the Spelling Bee.
