Solutions to Today’s Puzzle Including the Tricky Purple Category

Saturday’s New York Times Connections puzzle delivered something of a surprise for players expecting a patriotic Fourth of July theme: no fireworks, no flags, no founding fathers and no stars and stripes anywhere on the board. Instead, puzzle editor Wyna Liu served up a grid organized around words meaning to persist, poetic forms, tropical cocktails, and a fill-in-the-blank category built around the word “sweet,” the last of which proved to be the session’s most effective streak-breaker heading into the holiday weekend.

Here is a complete breakdown of every category and every answer for Connections puzzle number 1,119, published July 4, 2026.

Yellow: Persist

The yellow category, as always the most accessible of the four, grouped together four verbs all meaning to continue or endure: Continue, Last, Linger and Stay. Each word describes the act of remaining in place or carrying on despite an implied pressure to stop or leave. The category offered a straightforward entry point for most experienced solvers, with the shared meaning immediately apparent once the theme of persistence clicked. The one mild trap in this group was that words like Last and Stay can carry multiple meanings, but in this context the puzzle was clearly organizing them around their intransitive verb sense of enduring through time rather than any alternative usage.

Green: Kinds of Poems

Wednesday’s geography-themed puzzle asked players to find countries hidden inside other words. Saturday’s green category asked for something entirely different: recognizing four types of poems. The green group gathered Ballad, Epic, Ode and Villanelle, each of which names a distinct poetic form with specific structural or thematic characteristics. A ballad is a narrative poem or song, typically with repeated refrains and a storytelling structure. An epic is a long narrative poem traditionally concerned with heroic figures, usually drawn from mythology or national history, with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid as the most frequently cited examples. An ode is a formal lyric poem addressed to a particular subject, typically composed in praise or celebration of a person, place, event or abstract quality. The villanelle is perhaps the most structurally rigid of the four, a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets and a closing quatrain with a strict pattern of alternating rhymes and two refrains, best known to contemporary readers through Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Recognizing villanelle as a poetic form rather than as a character from the spy thriller television series Killing Eve was reportedly the gateway moment for a number of solvers who found this category first after the word stood out prominently on the board.

Blue: Tropical Drinks

The blue category grouped four cocktail names that share a tropical or island identity: Hurricane, Painkiller, Scorpion and Zombie. The Hurricane is a sweet, rum-based cocktail associated most closely with New Orleans and the Pat O’Brien’s bar where it was reportedly invented in the 1940s, served in a distinctive curved glass that mimics the shape of a hurricane lamp. The Painkiller is a rum-and-coconut drink that originated in the British Virgin Islands. The Scorpion is a Polynesian-style tiki cocktail typically made with rum, brandy and citrus, associated with the tiki bar culture that spread across the United States in the mid-twentieth century. The Zombie is perhaps the most legendary of the four, a potent rum-based cocktail created by Donn Beach in the 1930s and traditionally limited to two per customer at many bars due to its extremely high alcohol content. The shared tropical cocktail identity of all four words is clear in retrospect, but the category offered multiple misleading possibilities since Hurricane, Zombie, Scorpion and Painkiller all carry strong associations with other categories that could plausibly have appeared in a Connections puzzle on any given day.

Purple: Sweet ___

The purple category, which Connections traditionally reserves for the most challenging or wordplay-intensive grouping, asked players to identify four words that can each follow the word “sweet” to form a recognized compound word or common phrase. The purple answers were Spot, Dreams, Pea and Nothings. Sweet Spot refers to an optimal point or position, used across contexts from baseball hitting to product pricing. Sweet Dreams is a widely recognized expression and phrase associated with saying goodnight, wishing someone restful sleep. Sweet Pea is a climbing garden flower with fragrant blossoms and a term of endearment. Sweet Nothings refers to affectionate, inconsequential words whispered intimately between partners, as in the phrase “whispering sweet nothings.” The challenge in the purple category was separating these four words from other candidates on the board that could plausibly follow “sweet” in some context, and from the multiple alternative connections those same words suggested within the broader grid.

The puzzle was edited by Wyna Liu, who developed Connections for the New York Times in 2023 and whose editorial style emphasizes category overlap designed to mislead players who commit too early to groups that seem obvious. The game refreshes daily at midnight in each player’s local time zone, remains free to play on the Times’ website and app, and allows up to four incorrect guesses before ending the puzzle, giving players a modest safety margin while still preserving the meaningful sense of failure that makes a completed streak feel like an achievement worth protecting.