The Thursday edition of NYT Connections arrives with puzzle #1047, serving up a grid that rewards both literary knowledge and '80s music trivia. Today's challenge particularly favors readers who can spot subtle wordplay connections and navigate the tricky homophone territory between cheese and animated characters.
What Makes Connections Tick
For newcomers, NYT Connections presents 16 words that must be sorted into four thematic groups of four. The twist?
You're limited to four mistakes, and the color-coded difficulty system (yellow being easiest, purple being trickiest) means surface-level connections often mislead.
Since its June 2023 launch, Connections has carved out its niche in the Times' puzzle ecosystem, standing alongside Wordle and the crossword as a daily ritual for millions of players worldwide. The game's genius lies in its red herrings, words that could fit multiple categories but belong in only one.
Today's Grid at a Glance
Here are the 16 words staring back at you in puzzle #1047:
MOTHER | MY | NEIGHBOR | TOTORO
TOUCH | WHAMMY | SKIRT | SCIENCE
PULP | EDUCATED | LITERARY | ASIAGO
DEVOTE | VERY | HISTORICAL | FLANK
A seemingly random collection that somehow connects into four perfect categories, blending family relationships, literary genres, spatial positioning, and musical cheese puns.
Strategic Hints (No Spoilers Yet)
Yellow Category Nudge: Think about words that describe edges or boundaries, both physical and metaphorical.
Green Category Clue: Consider different sections of your local bookstore or library.
Blue Category Hint: Remember the classic mnemonic device for remembering the order of planets from the sun.
Purple Category Teaser: Each word begins with the name of a popular four-letter band from the 1980s.
The Full Solutions
Last chance to solve independently: answers below
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Yellow (Border): FLANK, NEIGHBOR, SKIRT, TOUCH
These four words all describe edges, boundaries, or positions adjacent to something. Flank refers to the side of something, neighbor describes someone living adjacent to you, skirt means to go around the edge, and touch can mean to be adjacent or in contact with.
The connection is spatial positioning rather than physical objects.
Green (Kinds of Fiction): HISTORICAL, LITERARY, PULP, SCIENCE
These represent distinct genres of fiction found in bookstores and libraries. Historical fiction is set in the past, literary fiction emphasizes artistic merit, pulp fiction refers to cheaply produced genre fiction, and science fiction explores speculative scientific concepts.
The category neatly covers major fiction classifications.
Blue (Words in a Planetary Mnemonic): EDUCATED, MOTHER, MY, VERY
These words form the classic mnemonic "My Very Educated Mother" for remembering the order of planets from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. The puzzle cleverly extracts the first word from each part of the mnemonic, testing both memory and pattern recognition.
Purple (Starting With Four-Letter '80s Bands): ASIAGO, DEVOTE, TOTORO, WHAMMY
Each word begins with the name of a four-letter band from the 1980s: ASIA (Asiago), DEVO (Devote), TOTO (Totoro), and WHAM! (Whammy).
This is the puzzle's trickiest category, requiring knowledge of both '80s music and the ability to spot the embedded band names at the start of each word.
The Verdict
Puzzle #1047 registers as moderate difficulty with a clever linguistic twist. Yellow falls quickly for anyone who recognizes spatial positioning terms, while green requires thinking about literary genres and bookstore sections.
Blue separates those who remember elementary school astronomy mnemonics from those who don't. Purple, predictably, is the streak-ender, that '80s band prefix trick won't reveal itself without serious lateral thinking and music knowledge.
The real trap lies in words like "SCIENCE" and "HISTORICAL," which could easily be misdirected into other categories, and "TOTORO" which feels like it belongs with "MOTHER" and "NEIGHBOR" in a family/relationship group rather than revealing its musical connection.
Reset and Repeat
Tomorrow's puzzle drops at midnight in your timezone. Until then, reflect on today's performance: did you spot the planetary mnemonic, or did the '80s band prefixes catch you off guard?
The beauty lies not in perfection but in training your brain to spot these hidden patterns and linguistic connections.
For now, puzzle #1047 is solved. See you at midnight for round #1048.
