Today's puzzle gets into the Halloween spirit with an age-old question, work-out routine, and dog competition.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for October 26 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,233. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,232, 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
- Welcome
- Halloweek
- Chilling
- Toy
- Yoga
- Jawn
- Sporting
- Prayer
- Psychs
- Hound
- Managing
- Wrestling
- Same old
- Hosted
- Herding
- Not bad
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Small talk
- 🟩 Green: Rolled up
- 🟦 Blue: Pups
- 🟪 Purple: Scary movies you sorta recognize
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: Responses to 'how are you'
- 🟩 Green: Kinds of mats
- 🟦 Blue: AKC dog breed groups
- 🟪 Purple: Horror movies with last letter changed
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 October 26 for puzzle #1,233 are a bit harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 out of 5.
- 🟨 Responses to 'how are you': Chilling, managing, not bad, same old
- 🟩 Kinds of mats: Prayer, welcome, wrestling, yoga
- 🟦 AKC dog breed groups: Herding, hound, sporting, toy
- 🟪 Horror movies with last letter changed: Halloweek, hosted, jawn, psychs
I went down the line today, though I fumbled a bit trying to get yellow on my first try. I knew not bad and same old were probably related, but I thought welcome might be among the mix too. After striking out once, I realized managing and chilling rounded out the rest of the catagory.
I tried to think of other uses for welcome, and came up with welcome mat, which led me to wrestling, yoga, and prayer to solve green.
AKC competitions are a staple around the holidays in my household, and I own a toy dog, so I was kicking myself for taking so long to see blue today. Herding, hound, and sporting make up the rest of the category.
I was scratching my head over what the heck jawn could be, and once I saw the category revealed, I realized the Connections crew embrace chaos. Halloweek, hosted, and psychs make up the rest of a particularly tricky purple category today.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Steal: Boost, palm, pocket, swipe
- 🟩 Pasta shapes: Bow tie, elbow, shell, wagon wheel
- 🟦 Fictional toms: Ripley, sawyer, swift, thumb
- 🟪 Things that can be snapped: Fingers, football, glow stick, rubber band
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,232 which had a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5.
The types of noodle shapes for green is what popped out at me at first, but I hadn't heard of wagon wheel so I put that to the side for a bit until I eliminated some other clues.
When I took a look through the board again, I realized yellow was probably another quartet of synonyms: boost, palm, pocket, and swipe. Then I looked up types of pastas and managed to get the rest of green along with bow tie, elbow, and shell.
I was an English major, so it's a bit embarrassing that blue came to me so late in the game with ripley, sawyer, swift, and tumb.
That left purple as today's rote fill with fingers, football, glow stick, and rubber band.
