Solving Puzzle Number 1,169 Without Spoilers

Fans of the New York Times’ popular word-grouping game Connections have a fresh puzzle to work through for Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026, marking game number 1,169 in the daily franchise. Below are hints organized by difficulty level, followed by the complete answer set for anyone ready to check their work.

Connections challenges players to sort 16 words into four groups of four, with each group sharing a hidden theme or connection. The puzzle assigns a color-coded difficulty level to each category: yellow represents the most straightforward group, followed by green, then blue, with purple reserved for the trickiest and most conceptually deceptive category of the day. Players are allowed up to four incorrect guesses before the puzzle ends and the full solution is revealed automatically. The game, created by New York Times puzzle editor Wyna Liu, launched in beta in June 2023 and has since grown into the second-most-played puzzle in the Times’ games lineup, trailing only Wordle itself in overall popularity.

According to Forbes, which rates each day’s puzzle difficulty on a five-point scale using its own Connections Bot tool, Sunday’s puzzle scored a 2 out of 5, indicating a relatively approachable solve compared with some of the more challenging entries the game has featured in recent weeks. Forbes writer Erik Kain described his own experience with the puzzle, noting that while the “potentially explosive things” category felt fairly easy to spot, he found himself momentarily thrown off by a cluster of words beginning with the letter “V” and by the presence of common household cleaning terms overlapping with an unrelated category, describing VACUUM in particular as “a red herring if ever there was one.”

Here are hints for each of today’s four categories, presented from easiest to hardest.

The yellow group, the most straightforward of the day, centers on things capable of causing a sudden, dangerous eruption or blast, whether figuratively or literally. According to NerdsChalk, this category blends straightforward action-oriented and descriptive words that should click into place relatively quickly once the underlying theme becomes clear.

The green group relies on a spelling-based pattern rather than a thematic one, according to NerdsChalk, which specifically flagged this as “a double-vowel category,” meaning each word in the group contains a repeated vowel pair somewhere within its spelling. This kind of structural, spelling-dependent connection often trips up players who focus purely on word meaning rather than letter patterns.

The blue group ties together four items connected to potatoes, according to Parade, which offered a playful hint pointing toward “the most consumed vegetable in the world.” The category spans a mix of food, drink and even an unconventional scientific application of the starchy vegetable, requiring players to think beyond potatoes’ most obvious culinary uses.

The purple group, traditionally the most conceptually challenging category each day, focuses on household products commonly used to remove stains, according to NME. This category proved particularly tricky given that several of its answers overlap in form or ingredients with other categories in the puzzle, requiring players to carefully distinguish between similar-sounding household staples used for entirely different everyday purposes.

Spoiler warning: The full answer set for today’s Connections puzzle follows below.

The complete answers for NYT Connections puzzle number 1,169, published Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026, are as follows, according to Forbes and Parade:

Yellow Group — Potentially Explosive Things: POWDER KEG, TIME BOMB, TINDERBOX, VOLCANO

Green Group — Double Vowels: ANTIFREEZE, BAZAAR, SKIING, VACUUM

Blue Group — Made With Potatoes: HOME FRIES, POTATO BATTERY, VICHYSSOISE, VODKA

Purple Group — Household Stain Removers: BAKING SODA, CLUB SODA, HYDROGEN PEROXIDE, VINEGAR

The blue category proved to be one of the more educational groupings of the day, requiring solvers to recognize a wider range of potato-derived items than the food-focused connections typically found in the puzzle. HOME FRIES represents the most familiar entry as a common breakfast side dish, while VICHYSSOISE, a chilled potato and leek soup, adds a more refined culinary reference to the mix. VODKA, which can be distilled from potatoes among other base ingredients, rounds out the more conventional food and drink entries, while POTATO BATTERY stands out as the category’s most unexpected inclusion, referencing the well-known science experiment in which a raw potato can be used to generate a small electrical current.

The purple category’s stain-remover theme created significant potential for confusion given the presence of overlapping “V” words and household substances elsewhere in the grid. BAKING SODA, CLUB SODA, HYDROGEN PEROXIDE and VINEGAR are all commonly used as household cleaning agents capable of lifting stains from fabric or surfaces, but several of those words could plausibly have been mistaken for ingredients tied to the potato-based blue category or the double-vowel green category instead, a deliberate design choice consistent with how the puzzle typically embeds decoys to challenge solvers.

For players hoping to preserve a winning streak or avoid accidentally spoiling the puzzle for themselves, Connections resets at midnight local time each day, consistent with the New York Times’ broader approach to its daily puzzle offerings, meaning today’s puzzle and its answers will remain the same for all players regardless of time zone, while a fresh puzzle becomes available starting at each individual player’s local midnight.