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Connections is a daily word-grouping puzzle from The New York Times, edited by Wyna Liu. You're handed 16 words and have to sort them into four hidden groups of four, with only four mistakes allowed before the round ends. The groups are color-coded by difficulty — yellow is the most straightforward, purple is the trickiest.

NYT Connections gives you a 4×4 grid of words. Your job is to group them into four sets of four that share something in common — a category, a theme, or a piece of wordplay. Many words look like they fit more than one group; only one grouping is correct.

• Don't submit your first idea immediately. Scan the rest of the board first — Connections almost always plants a word that fits your group better than one you've already chosen.
• Words with more than one meaning are usually the trap. If a word could plausibly sit in two categories, it's probably there on purpose.
• Save purple for last. It's typically wordplay rather than a straightforward theme, and the other three groups often make it obvious by elimination.
• If two groups seem to want the same word, solve the other two groups first. Whatever's left over usually settles the dispute.
• Use your four mistakes wisely. A near-miss ("one away") is useful information — it tells you exactly one word in your guess belongs somewhere else.
• Blue and green often lean on trivia, not synonyms. Under editor Wyna Liu, those two groups regularly pull from specific knowledge — brand names, abbreviations, niche facts — rather than words that simply mean the same thing.