Hints and Answers for September 25, 2026 as Puzzle 1202 Gets Fancy and Famous

Puzzle number 1,202 of The New York Times’ Connections game challenged solvers Friday with a grid blending words for luxury, mechanical clock parts, a lineup of famous men named Dan, and a wordplay category built around altered scientific terms.

Connections presents players with 16 words that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four, with each group sharing a common category. The puzzle rates each group’s difficulty using a color system: yellow for the most straightforward connection, green for slightly trickier, blue for more difficult, and purple, typically the most wordplay-heavy or misleading group, as the hardest.

For those still working through Friday’s puzzle, here are hints for each category, organized loosely from easiest to hardest, without giving away the specific words involved.

One category groups together words that all describe something upscale, stylish or expensive, the kind of vocabulary someone might use to describe a lavish hotel or an extravagant outfit. A second category brings together technical components found inside a traditional mechanical clock, the kind of vocabulary a clockmaker or watch enthusiast would recognize immediately, even if it is less familiar to everyday puzzle solvers. A third category groups together the surnames of several well-known men who all share the same first name, spanning entertainment, journalism and advice writing. The fourth and trickiest category takes standard scientific vocabulary learned in a biology classroom and alters each word slightly by adding an extra letter, transforming familiar taxonomic terms into words that look similar but mean something entirely different.

SPOILER WARNING: The full solution to Friday’s Connections puzzle follows below. Stop reading now if you’d rather work through the categories on your own.

Friday’s puzzle resolved into the following four groups. The category Luxe consisted of BOUGIE, FANCY, POSH and SWANK, four words used to describe something stylish, upscale or extravagant. The category Parts of a Mechanical Clock grouped ESCAPEMENT, PENDULUM, RATCHET and SPRING, four technical components found inside traditional clockwork mechanisms. The category Famous Dans brought together AYKROYD, LEVY, RATHER and SAVAGE, referring respectively to actor and Ghostbusters co-creator Dan Aykroyd, Schitt’s Creek co-creator and star Dan Levy, longtime CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, and journalist and relationship advice columnist Dan Savage. The final and trickiest category, Taxonomic Ranks Plus a Letter, consisted of BORDER, CLASSY, FOAMILY and GENIUS, wordplay entries formed by adding a single letter to the standard biological classification terms “order,” “class,” “family” and “genus,” respectively.

Puzzle guides covering Friday’s grid noted that the clock-related category required more specialized, technical knowledge than the other groups, since words like “escapement” are unlikely to be part of most solvers’ everyday vocabulary despite being fundamental components of how mechanical clocks actually function. The famous-name category similarly demanded recognition of specific public figures rather than relying on word meaning alone, requiring solvers to correctly identify which surnames paired with the first name Dan. The purple wordplay category, meanwhile, rewarded solvers who inspected the words closely for hidden patterns, such as an unexpected extra letter, rather than searching for a more conventional thematic connection between the four entries.

Connections has grown into one of the Times’ most consistently played daily puzzles since its official launch in 2023, expanding the newspaper’s games portfolio well beyond its traditional crossword offerings. Puzzle guides recommend a general strategy of scanning the full grid first for any words that seem to share an obvious connection, then working through the remaining words methodically to identify less immediately apparent categories, an approach puzzle trackers said worked particularly well for Friday’s grid given how distinctly separate the puzzle’s four categories were from one another in terms of subject matter.

Players attempting Friday’s puzzle are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends, with each group color-coded upon a correct guess to indicate which of the four difficulty tiers it belongs to. Players looking to track their performance on Friday’s puzzle, or compare notes with friends, can share their results through Connections’ built-in results screen, which uses colored emoji squares to display a player’s guessing sequence without revealing the actual category words, a sharable format that has become a familiar sight across social media in the years since the game’s launch.

With Friday’s puzzle now solved, players will have a fresh set of 16 words and four new hidden categories to work through when Saturday’s edition of Connections goes live at midnight local time, continuing the daily puzzle’s steady run as one of the Times’ most widely shared games alongside Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword.