Today’s NYT Connections puzzle has four groups built around construction verbs, Super Mario characters, hidden fruits, and words that start with synonyms for happiness. One hint per color is below scroll further only when you want the full reveal. And no, Mashable doesn’t run its own separate “Connections” game; it covers the daily NYT puzzle, same as several other outlets.
Wait Does Mashable Have Its Own Connections Game?
No. “Mashable Connections” is search shorthand, not a separate product. The New York Times owns and publishes Connections; Mashable is one of several outlets Parade and TechRadar cover it too that write daily hint-and-answer guides for it. If you’ve seen “Mashable Connections Hint Today” and wondered whether that’s a different puzzle from the one on nytimes.com, it isn’t. Same game, same daily reset, just different sites explaining it.
Today’s Connections Hints One Clue Per Color
Ordered from easiest to hardest, the way NYT designs the board:
Yellow hint: Four words that all secretly work as verbs meaning “to make or build something.”
Green hint: Four characters or job titles pulled straight from the Super Mario universe.
Blue hint: Each word has a fruit tucked inside it, with exactly one extra letter bolted on at the front.
Purple hint: Every word opens with a shorter word that means happiness or delight the rest is just along for the ride.
Traps to Watch For in Today’s Puzzle
The nature trap. A mushroom is a fungus, and a few other words on the board read like biology terms too. That grouping feels obvious and it’s wrong. The words that look like a “nature/science” cluster actually belong to two completely different categories in this puzzle.
The “form vs. function” trap. A few words can mean both “a physical shape” and “the act of shaping something.” If you group them by their noun meaning instead of their verb meaning, you’ll grab the wrong four.
The disguised-brand trap. One word looks like a modern dating app or product name. Ignore what it means on its surface, today’s puzzle only cares about which fruit is hiding inside it.
Today’s Connections Group Names
- CONSTRUCT
- SUPER MARIO FIGURES
- FRUITS PLUS STARTING LETTER
- STARTING WITH MERRIMENTS
Recognize your group from the words you’ve already sorted? Lock it in. If not, keep reading.
Today’s Full Connections Answers
Spoiler zone everything past this point gives away the whole board.
| Color | Category | Words |
| Yellow | CONSTRUCT | FASHION, MODEL, MOLD, SHAPE |
| Green | SUPER MARIO FIGURES | DINOSAUR, MUSHROOM, PLUMBER, PRINCESS |
| Blue | FRUITS PLUS STARTING LETTER | DAPPLE, JDATE, SLIME, SPEAR |
| Purple | STARTING WITH MERRIMENTS | CHEERIOS, FUNGUS, GLEEK, JOYSTICK |
Why Each Answer Works
CONSTRUCT: Fashion, model, mold, and shape all have a lesser-used verb sense meaning “to make or form something” you can fashion a tool from scrap wire, model clay into a figure, mold something into a shape, or simply shape it directly. NYT buried the verb behind each word’s more familiar noun identity.
SUPER MARIO FIGURES: Dinosaur (Yoshi), mushroom (the power-up), plumber (Mario’s actual job), and princess (Peach) are all recognizable pieces of the Mario franchise plumber is the sneaky one, since it doesn’t read as a “character” at first glance.
FRUITS PLUS STARTING LETTER: Each word is a fruit with one letter tacked onto the front D+APPLE, J+DATE, S+LIME, S+PEAR. This is the kind of wordplay category that only clicks once you stop reading words at face value and start scanning them for smaller words hiding inside.
STARTING WITH MERRIMENTS: Cheerios, fungus, gleek, and joystick all open with a word for happiness CHEER, FUN, GLEE, JOY before the rest of the word takes over. It’s the same trick as the fruit category, just applied to feelings instead of foods.
How Hard Was Today’s Puzzle?
I don’t have a live pull of NYT’s Connections Companion difficulty score for #1146, so I won’t put a number on it but structurally, this is a classic Friday-tier puzzle: two straightforward categories (Mario, construction verbs) paired with two categories that require spotting hidden wordplay, which is usually where solvers burn their mistakes.
How to Play NYT Connections (Quick Refresher)
Connections gives you 16 words and asks you to sort them into four groups of four, each sharing a hidden theme. Guess wrong four times and the puzzle ends, revealing everything. Yellow is always the easiest category, purple the hardest and the trickiest part isn’t the vocabulary, it’s resisting the first grouping that seems obvious.
Conclusion
Today’s puzzle rewards reading words for what they hide, not what they mean two categories are wordplay traps in disguise. If you’re stuck, the traps section above tells you exactly which “obvious” groupings to abandon.
FAQs
What’s today’s Connections answer?
Puzzle #1146 (July 31, 2026) breaks into CONSTRUCT, SUPER MARIO FIGURES, FRUITS PLUS STARTING LETTER, and STARTING WITH MERRIMENTS full word list above.
How do you play NYT Connections?
Sort 16 words into four groups of four that share a hidden theme. You get four mistakes before the puzzle reveals the answers automatically.
Does Mashable have its own Connections game?
No Mashable publishes daily hints and answers for the New York Times’ Connections puzzle. It doesn’t own or run a separate game by that name.
What time does Connections reset each day?
Like Wordle, Connections resets at midnight local time, tied to NYT’s server schedule so a new puzzle is live for everyone by early morning US time.
