The Tuesday edition of NYT Connections arrives with puzzle #1108, serving up a grid that rewards board-game familiarity, dance-floor knowledge, and the kind of lateral thinking that separates the streak-keepers from the reset-clickers. Today's challenge particularly favors Monopoly veterans and anyone who can spot a sneaky homophone trap in the purple category.
What Makes Connections Tick
For newcomers, NYT Connections presents 16 words that must be sorted into four thematic groups of four. The twist? The game doesn't tell you the categories, you have to find them by spotting hidden patterns, discarding red herrings, and trusting your instincts.
You're limited to four mistakes, and the color-coded difficulty system (yellow being easiest, purple being trickiest) means surface-level connections often mislead. A word that looks like it belongs to one group might be a decoy for another.
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 #1108:
MONEY | YANKEES | HOTEL | FOXTROT
MODERN | FIREPLACE | POPULAR | DEED
EMPEROR | FEATURED | TOKEN | TAP
RECENT | SWING | EARTH | TRENDING
A seemingly random collection that somehow connects into four perfect categories, if you can see past the obvious traps.
Strategic Hints (No Spoilers Yet)
Yellow Category Nudge: These aren't just ways to move your body, they're specific, named styles with deep roots in music history.
Green Category Clue: Think about what you'd find scattered across a colorful game board, especially when someone lands on the right square and starts collecting.
Blue Category Hint: This is how you'd sort content if you wanted to surface what's hot, what's fresh, and what the algorithm wants you to see first.
Purple Category Teaser: These four things all share a word that sounds exactly like something else, a classic homophone trap that rewards pronunciation, not spelling.
The Full Solutions
Last chance to solve independently: answers below
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Yellow (Dance Styles): FOXTROT, MODERN, SWING, TAP
The easiest category falls into place once you stop reading these as generic verbs and start thinking about ballroom floors and dance studios. Foxtrot, modern, swing, and tap are all distinct dance styles, though "modern" might trip you up if you read it as a time period rather than a dance genre.
Green (In a Monopoly Box): DEED, HOTEL, MONEY, TOKEN
Any Monopoly veteran will spot this one quickly. A deed proves you own the property, hotels are the peak investment, money fuels the whole operation, and tokens (the thimble, the top hat, the Scottie dog) are how you move around the board. "Token" is the sneaky one here, it also pulls double duty as a general-use word, but in this context, it's strictly Park Place real estate.
Blue (Content Sorting Options Online): FEATURED, POPULAR, RECENT, TRENDING
This is the category that rewards digital natives, anyone who's scrolled through an e-commerce site, a streaming platform, or a social feed recognizes these as content-filtering tabs. Featured items get editorial push, popular picks are crowd-approved, recent drops are chronological, and trending shows what's exploding right now. No physical objects here, this is pure UI vocabulary.
Purple (Things With Mantles/Mantels): EARTH, EMPEROR, FIREPLACE, YANKEES
This is today's streak-ender. The word "mantle" ties them all together, but it's a homophone that splits across two spellings. Earth has a mantle (geological layer), an emperor wears a mantle (royal cloak), a fireplace has a mantel (the shelf above it), and the Yankees have a mantle (referencing Mickey Mantle, the legendary center fielder). The spelling difference between "mantle" and "mantel" is the kind of linguistic trap that makes you feel brilliant when you crack it, or foolish when you don't.
The Verdict
Puzzle #1108 registers as moderate difficulty with a sting in the tail. Yellow falls quickly for anyone who recognizes dance-style names, while green is a gift for board-game enthusiasts who've bankrupted friends at Monopoly night.
Blue separates the digital natives from the casual scrollers, if you don't spend time on content-heavy platforms, those sorting terms might look like random adjectives. Purple, predictably, is the streak-ender; that homophone trick won't reveal itself without serious lateral thinking and a bit of baseball history knowledge.
The real trap here is "popular", it could easily masquerade as a synonym for "trending" or "featured" in the blue category, and "modern" could tempt you toward a time-period grouping instead of the yellow dance category. The puzzle's misdirection is subtle but effective: it makes you question whether you're seeing a dance move or a chronology, a board-game piece or a general concept.
Reset and Repeat
Tomorrow's puzzle drops at midnight in your timezone. Until then, reflect on today's performance: did the Monopoly category click immediately, or did the purple mantle/mantel trap catch you off guard?
The beauty lies not in perfection but in training your brain to spot these hidden patterns, and today's grid offered plenty of practice in lateral thinking and homophone awareness.
For now, puzzle #1108 is solved. See you at midnight for round #1109.
