The Thursday edition of NYT Connections arrives with puzzle #1075, serving up a grid that rewards sports terminology knowledge, pie expertise, and a willingness to think about butts. Today's challenge particularly favors tennis fans and bakers who can also navigate some delightfully crude wordplay.
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 #1075:
LOVE | CHESS | HONEY | MOON
PEACH | HOT | YELLOW | PUMPKIN
ADVANTAGE | CAN | PECAN | COLONEL
DEUCE | SHOOFLY | CABOOSE | FORTY
A seemingly random collection that somehow connects into four perfect categories.
Strategic Hints (No Spoilers Yet)
Yellow Category Nudge: Think dessert, not dinner. These words all describe something you'd find on a dessert table at a holiday gathering.
Green Category Clue: This one's all about rear ends—literally. Think slang terms for the backside, from the anatomical to the vehicular.
Blue Category Hint: Advantage, deuce, love—if these ring a bell from the court, you're on the right track. What game uses all these scoring terms?
Purple Category Teaser: Colonel, honey, hot, yellow—each of these words pairs with the same condiment to form a compound name or phrase. That condiment is the key.
The Full Solutions
Last chance to solve independently: answers below
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Yellow (Kinds of Pies): CHESS, PECAN, PUMPKIN, SHOOFLY
Yellow category lands as the easiest today, and pie lovers will breeze through it. Chess pie (a Southern custard classic), pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and shoofly pie (a molasses-based Pennsylvania Dutch staple) are all recognizable dessert staples.
Green (Things Associated With Butts): CABOOSE, CAN, MOON, PEACH
Green delivers the day's cheekiest category—literally. Caboose (a train's rear car, or slang for butt), can (as in "get your can over here"), moon (as in the verb or "mooning"), and peach (as in "what a peach"—old-school slang for a nice rear end) all describe derrières. If you got stuck on "moon" thinking astronomy or "peach" thinking fruit, the game's misdirection worked perfectly.
Blue (Tennis Scoring Terms): ADVANTAGE, DEUCE, FORTY, LOVE
Blue requires familiarity with tennis scoring, which uses its own peculiar vocabulary. Advantage (the point after deuce), deuce (40-40), forty (the third point in a game), and love (zero) are all standard tennis scoring terms. "Love" and "forty" could easily trap solvers into other categories—love as a romantic term, forty as a number—but on the court, they mean something very specific.
Purple (___ Mustard): COLONEL, HONEY, HOT, YELLOW
Purple is the trickiest today, and it hinges on a single condiment: mustard. Colonel Mustard (the Clue board game character), honey mustard, hot mustard, and yellow mustard are all common mustard varieties or mustard-related phrases. The trap here is that "honey," "hot," and "yellow" all feel like standalone descriptors that could fit elsewhere—honey could be sweet, hot could be spicy, yellow could be a color—but the compound "___ mustard" pattern is the connective tissue.
The Verdict
Puzzle #1075 registers as moderate difficulty with a sting in the tail. Yellow falls quickly for anyone who recognizes pie varieties, while green requires thinking about anatomy in a playful way.
Blue separates the tennis fans from the casual observers. Purple, predictably, is the streak-ender—that mustard compound pattern won't reveal itself without serious lateral thinking.
The real trap today is "love" and "forty" masquerading as romantic and numerical terms, and "moon" and "peach" pulling double duty as celestial and fruity red herrings. If you chased "chess" into a gaming category or "colonel" into a military one, you felt the full force of the game's intentional misdirection.
Reset and Repeat
Tomorrow's puzzle drops at midnight in your timezone. Until then, reflect on today's performance: did the pie category come easy, or did the butt slang throw you for a loop?
The beauty lies not in perfection but in training your brain to spot these hidden patterns.
For now, puzzle #1075 is solved. See you at midnight for round #1076.
