The answer to NYT Connections #1177 on August 31, 2026 is below – all four colour groups solved. If you want a hint before the reveal, three clues for today’s hardest category appear after the table.
| 🟡 Yellow – Easiest | Things that come in tubes: LIPSTICK, POSTER, TENNIS BALLS, TOOTHPASTE |
| 🟢 Green | Warnings on a shipping box: FRAGILE, HEAVY, PERISHABLE, THIS SIDE UP |
| 🔵 Blue | Historical sovereign titles: CALIPH, KHAN, PHARAOH, SHOGUN |
| 🟣 Purple – Hardest | ___ Bowl: DUST, POKE, SALAD, SUPER |
Hints (no spoilers):
Hint 1: The Purple category pairs a 1930s American environmental disaster with a food trend, a cultural metaphor, and one of the biggest sporting events in the world.
Hint 2: One Yellow word is something you roll on your lips; another is something you roll onto a wall.
Hint 3: The Blue category spans four distinct civilisations across roughly two thousand years of history.
Today’s puzzle rewarded breadth of knowledge over pattern-matching. The Yellow category felt immediate for most solvers – LIPSTICK, POSTER, TENNIS BALLS and TOOTHPASTE share a cylindrical container – but the connector “things that come in tubes” was precise enough to trip up anyone who anchored on the wrong shared quality. Green thought like a warehouse manager, grouping FRAGILE, HEAVY, PERISHABLE and THIS SIDE UP as the standard warnings stamped on delivery cartons.
Blue was the category most likely to divide the room. CALIPH (Islamic caliphates), KHAN (Mongol and Turkic empires), PHARAOH (ancient Egypt) and SHOGUN (feudal Japan) are sovereign titles from four entirely separate civilisations and eras. The category demanded genuine historical breadth rather than pop-culture fluency – solvers strong in one period but thin in another hit real difficulty here.
Purple’s ___ Bowl construction mixed registers in the classic hard-tier fashion: DUST Bowl (the 1930s agricultural catastrophe across the American Great Plains), POKE Bowl (the Hawaiian grain-bowl dish), SALAD Bowl (the multicultural-society metaphor) and SUPER Bowl (the NFL championship game). Seeing POKE or SALAD next to SUPER required a willingness to let go of the first association that came to mind – the defining test of a well-constructed Purple category.
Yesterday’s full solution is in the NYT Connections #1176 answers for August 30, 2026. The puzzle resets daily at midnight Eastern Time and is free to play on The New York Times Games page.
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