The NYT Connections answers today, for Tuesday, August 25, 2026, solve puzzle #1171. The four groups are adjectives for things with no depth, science-fiction staples, Stephen King films that all take a “The”, and four phrases that end in an ice cream order.
The grid runs on one piece of misdirection, and it is a good one. ONE-DIMENSIONAL is the most science-fictional word on the board. It is not in the science-fiction group.
Connections Hints Today, August 25, 2026 (#1171)
- Yellow: four ways of saying there is nothing underneath.
- Green: four things that happen constantly on screen and never once in a laboratory.
- Blue: put “The” in front of each one and you have four films from a single novelist.
- Purple: ignore the first word of each phrase. Order the second one in a cup or a cone.
Connections Answers Today: All Four Groups (#1171)
Purple Is the Group That Opens the Board
SHAKE, SCOOP, SPLIT, CONE. Four things handed across an ice cream counter, and every one of them is buried at the end of a phrase about something else entirely. The HARLEM SHAKE is a Harlem dance that a video meme turned into something else. The INSIDE SCOOP is journalism. A TRAFFIC CONE is orange plastic. LICKETY-SPLIT just means fast.
LICKETY-SPLIT is the tell. It is the only entry in the grid that is not a noun or an adjective, and Connections almost never drops an adverb in with three nouns unless the category has stopped caring what the words mean and started caring how they end.
Where Solvers Lose Puzzle #1171
On ONE-DIMENSIONAL. It means shallow, it belongs to yellow, and it is sitting in the same sixteen squares as HYPERSPACE, PARALLEL UNIVERSE and TIME WARP. Dimensions are green’s entire vocabulary. A solver who finds three science-fiction tiles and needs a fourth will reach for it, and the grid is built to let them.
TIME WARP is the second trap, and it pulls the other way. It is the song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show before it is a physics idea, so a solver who has already worked out that blue is about films can drag it there. GREEN MILE, LONG WALK and RUNNING MAN make that worse. Read them cold and they are three phrases about distance and motion, which looks like a category of its own right up until the fourth one refuses to fit.
Half of the Blue Group Was Written by a Man Who Did Not Exist
The blue entries are Stephen King adaptations, and they split cleanly in two. The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Mile in 1999 were both directed by Frank Darabont, and both came out of King’s prison writing rather than his horror. The Long Walk and The Running Man both reached cinemas in 2025.
The pair that arrived last year share something the other two do not. Both novels were published under Richard Bachman, the pen name King used from the late 1970s to find out whether his sales came from his writing or from his name. Bachman was given a biography and an author photograph, and the ruse held until a bookshop clerk in Washington found King’s name on a copyright filing and wrote to him about it. Half of today’s blue group is Bachman.
Is Connections #1171 Hard?
Mid-range, with the difficulty loaded at the front. Open on purple and the rest takes a minute. Open on green and ONE-DIMENSIONAL will cost you a life before you have completed anything at all.
We are not putting a difficulty score on it, because there is not an honest one to give this early. The rating The New York Times attaches to a Connections grid is built from what solvers report after they play, and at reset almost nobody has played it. Any number published in the first hours of the day is a guess wearing a decimal point.
Yesterday’s Connections answers hid four tennis terms behind the names of letters, another grid where the trick was in how the words sounded rather than what they meant.
Today’s other puzzles: Wordle #1893, Strands #905 and the Mini Crossword.
