Hidden Insult Trick Catches Solvers Off Guard

Sunday’s edition of The New York Times’ popular word-grouping game served up a grid that rewarded sitcom knowledge, weather vocabulary, and a genuinely devious wordplay twist that left even experienced solvers second-guessing their early progress.

How the Game Works

For newcomers, NYT Connections presents 16 words that must be sorted into four thematic groups of four. Players are limited to four mistakes, and the color-coded difficulty system, with yellow being easiest and purple being trickiest, means surface-level connections often mislead solvers into incorrect groupings. Since its June 2023 launch, Connections has carved out its own niche in the Times’ puzzle ecosystem, standing alongside Wordle and the crossword as a daily ritual for millions of players worldwide.

Sunday’s Four Categories

The themes and answers for the June 21, 2026, NYT Connections puzzle were as follows:

Yellow Group: Precipitation — DRIZZLE, RAIN, SHOWERS, SPRINKLES.

Green Group: Bowls Over — FLOORS, ROCKS, STUNS, SURPRISES.

Blue Group: NBC Sitcoms — COMMUNITY, FRIENDS, SCRUBS, WINGS.

Purple Group: Starting With Kinds of Insults — BARBADOS, DIGGITY, DISSECT, SLAPDASH.

Breaking Down the Categories

Puzzle #1106 registers as moderate difficulty with a sting in the tail. Yellow falls quickly for weather watchers, while Green requires recognizing figurative language, though ROCKS might briefly send solvers down a geology rabbit hole before they realize the category actually centers on verbs meaning to overwhelm, impress, or astonish someone.

Blue separates the sitcom streamers from the casual viewers, drawing together four popular television shows that all originally aired on the same network. The category particularly favors NBC fans and anyone familiar with the network’s long history of beloved comedy programming.

The Purple Category’s Wordplay Trap

As is typical for Connections puzzles, the purple category delivered the day’s most challenging twist, built around a hidden prefix scheme rather than any straightforward thematic connection. Purple, predictably, is the streak-ender — that hidden-insult-prefix trick won’t reveal itself without serious lateral thinking about word construction rather than word meaning.

The category required players to recognize that each of the four words begins with a term that, on its own, functions as a mild insult or criticism. BARBADOS looks like a Caribbean vacation, not a diss track waiting to happen, while the remaining words in the category similarly disguised their insult-prefix connection behind everyday vocabulary that gave no immediate indication of the underlying wordplay.

Where Players Got Tripped Up

Beyond the purple category’s central trick, several individual words throughout the grid were specifically designed to mislead solvers into incorrect early groupings. SCRUBS could have been mistaken for cleaning or medical terms, and WINGS might have sent solvers toward birds or aviation, rather than their actual placement within the NBC sitcoms category.

One puzzle solver who completed Sunday’s grid without any mistakes described their solving order as starting with the more straightforward categories before tackling the trickier ones. “I didn’t make any mistakes this time. Here’s the order I solved them in: yellow, green, blue, purple,” the solver noted, describing their experience working through Sunday’s puzzle.

Tips for Future Puzzles

Connections veterans continue to recommend scanning for the most straightforward, tightly defined categories first, such as colors, numbers, animals, or other clearly bounded groupings, since these tend to be the easiest to lock down early and build solving momentum. Puzzle editor Wyna Liu is famous for mixing categories that overlap, so when a word seems to fit multiple potential groups, solvers are encouraged to assume the puzzle is deliberately trying to mislead them rather than taking the most obvious interpretation at face value.

Purple is specifically designed for wordplay and misdirection, frequently incorporating idioms, homophones, or cultural references that only become clear once the more straightforward categories have already been solved and removed from the board.

The Game’s Continued Popularity

Launched in June 2023, Connections is one of the New York Times’ newest puzzle hits, second only to Wordle in overall popularity among the publication’s growing portfolio of daily games. The game’s format, which combines straightforward vocabulary categories with increasingly abstract and wordplay-driven groupings, has helped it build a dedicated daily following that treats the puzzle as an essential complement to Wordle in their daily routine.

Where to Find More Puzzle Help

Beyond Connections, The New York Times Games collection includes several related puzzles such as Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword, and a dedicated Connections Sports Edition that tests knowledge of athletic trivia using the same grouping format. Sunday’s slate also included Strands puzzle number 840 and Connections Sports Edition puzzle number 636, giving puzzle enthusiasts a broad menu of additional daily challenges beyond the standard Connections grid alone.

With Sunday’s puzzle now solved by players who successfully navigated both the NBC sitcom category and the hidden insult-prefix trick in purple, attention turns to Monday’s edition, puzzle number 1107, when a fresh sixteen-word grid and an entirely new set of hidden categories will be waiting for the Connections community’s next daily challenge.