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Today's puzzle wants you to quiz your pop culture knowledge.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 26 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,080. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,079, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
What is Connections
Solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Today's Connection Grid and Words
- Big
- Ring
- Tinsel
- Focus
- Airplane
- Cup
- Point
- Silent
- Listen
- Clue
- Subject
- Twins
- Pennant
- Enlist
- Concern
- Medal
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Winner
- 🟩 Green: It's in front of you
- 🟦 Blue: Throwback
- 🟪 Purple: Rearranging
Today's Connections Group Hints
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Championship Awards
- 🟩 Green: Matter at Hand
- 🟦 Blue: '80s Comedies
- 🟪 Purple: Anagrams
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Today's Connections answers
The Connections answers on May 24 for puzzle #1,078 are much easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Championship Awards: Cup, Medal, Pennant, Ring
- 🟩 Matter at Hand: Concern, Focus, Point, Subject
- 🟦 '80s Comedies: Airplane, Big, Clue, Twins
- 🟪 Anagrams: Enlist, Listen, Silent, Tinsel
Today's Connections was quick and painless, which is always nice. I figured out the yellow in a couple of seconds, as they're all pretty common words for things you win in sports.
From there, it was on to the green category, which came together pretty smoothly, figuring that it was the current issue (which ended up being the matter at hand).
Finally, I figured out blue, which was 80s comedies. I've seen all of them, so it wasn't too difficult to dig into the memory bank and pull them out.
And then I was left with four in the purple category, which ended up all being anagrams for each other, which is a clever puzzle that's actually quite tough if it wasn't for the process of elimination.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Common Promo Items: Cap, Pin, Shirt, Sticker
- 🟩 Tiny Bit: Jot, Scrap, Shred, Whit
- 🟦 Texting Abbreviations: Atm, Cya, Lol, Tia
- 🟪 Eye___: Ball, Brow, Lash, Lid
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,079, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5.
Today's Connections was super hard for me, as I got stuck on the Tiny Bit clue after solving the texting abbreviations and promo items very quickly. I've never heard the word jot used for a little bit — I've only known it as writing something down.
Still, after a bit of brute force and trial and error, I did eventually piece it together, which only left me with the purple section (though, in retrospect, eye ___ would probably have been an easier one to tackle, given how stuck I was for a while).
