NYT Connections today hints and answers for Saturday, February 21 #986

NYTimes Connections — (Image credit: Future)

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Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on February 21 for puzzle #986 are significantly easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.5 out of 5.

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

The New York Times Connections puzzle on February 21, 2026 — (Image credit: New York Times)

Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, 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.

Today's Connections words are: Late, Great, Past, Life, Present, Minion, Infinitive, Perfect, Solid, Dodgers, Excused, Background, Absent, Audits, History, and Phew.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

🟨 Yellow: Experience
🟩 Green: Attendance status
🟦 Blue: Commentary about your connections results
🟪 Purple: Car brands plus two letters

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.

Here's a larger hint: Experience attendance while commenting on cars.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #986?

Drumroll, please...

🟨 Experience: Background, history, life, past
🟩 Attendance status: Absent, excused, late, present
🟦 Commentary about your connections results: Great, perfect, phew, solid
🟪 Car brands plus two letters: Audits, dodgers, infinitive, minion

I saw absent, late, present, and excused for the first set.

Next, I had great, perfect, and solid. It took a minute to find phew, but we got there.

I still wasn't seeing the purple set so I threw in background, history, life and past as I found it.

Which left audits, dodgers, infinitive, and minion as the final four.

Yesterday's Connections answers

🟨 Quick fix: Easy answer, magic wand, panacea, silver bullet
🟩 Associated with the moon: Eclipse, green cheese, tide, werewolf
🟦 Original Monopoly tokens: Boot, iron, thimble, top hat
🟪 What "jack" might refer to: Cheese, donkey, playing card, socket

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #985, which had a difficulty rating of 3.5 out of 5.

There are a couple of traps in today's puzzle around potential werewolf and magician groups. However, they're mostly distractions.

I started with green cheese, which I knew of as moon-related. Coupled with werewolf, eclipse, and then tide, we've got a lunar evening.

Top hat did make me think of magicians, but seeing thimble got me to boot and iron, which I knew of as tokens.

Finally, I saw the quick fixes in easy answer, magic wand, panacea, and silver bullet, and assumed they were yellow.

So, I threw in the cheese, donkey, playing card, and socket without catching the jack connection, mostly because I was unfamiliar with the term jack for a donkey. Some brief research suggests that a jack is a male donkey that is capable of breeding. A John is usually a castrated or gelded donkey while a Jenny is a female donkey.

Fixes went in last.

Connections tips — how to win at Connections

There are two ways to play Connections, get the answers as you solve them or solve for the hardest group, Purple, first.

For either playstyle, the best tip I can give is to not be afraid of the shuffle button, especially if you’ve solved a set but you’re certain it isn’t the Purple group. You can shuffle the grid until your solved quartet is in a somewhat staked off area.

For the purple group, you can expect to see a handful of category types: words missing a letter, homophones, words with specific suffixes or prefixes, and [blank] word (or word [blank]). There are others, but this is a majority of what you’ll see. It can help to look for purple connections through one of those lenses.

If you’re not hunting for purple specifically, then the best advice I have is to look for smaller connections. For example, Riddler and Joker are Batman villains. Once you’ve grouped that duo together it’s easier to find another set.

Finally, watch out for traps. Occasionally, the Connections makers like to throw in a set of words that should seem very obvious to most people. But picking them can give you a strike, something you want to save for when you aren’t really sure between a couple of clues.

The tricky bit is that sometimes the very obvious foursome is actually one of the answers (usually the yellow or green levels).

One way to work around this is to note the four clues you think are an obvious set. Highlight them by selecting the words but don’t hit submit. From there take a second look around the grid to see if anything else stands out to you.

Often these super obvious sets are actually individually spread out between the four groups. So, if you see Wick, Neo, Ted and Mnemonic, you might immediately think of Keanu Reeves movies, but it's a trick. Instead, use the individual words as launching points to discover other connections.

If you're new to the game you should also take a look at our How to play Connections guide.

Got some thoughts about today's puzzle you want to share? Email us at scott.younker@futurenet.com or alyse.stanley@futurenet.com to get in touch.

Scott Younker is the West Coast Reporter at Tom’s Guide. He covers all the lastest tech news. He’s been involved in tech since 2011 at various outlets and is on an ongoing hunt to build the easiest to use home media system. When not writing about the latest devices, you are more than welcome to discuss board games or disc golf with him. He also handles all the Connections coverage on Tom's Guide and has been playing the addictive NYT game since it released.

With contributions from

Alyse StanleyNews Editor