I search "Mashable Connections hint today" almost as often as I search the actual puzzle site, and I suspect a lot of you do the same thing. Quick clarification before we go further, because it trips people up constantly: Mashable doesn't run its own separate word game called "Connections." Mashable publishes daily hint-and-answer coverage of The New York Times' Connections puzzle, the same way outlets like Parade, TechRadar, and Forbes do. "Mashable Connections" is really just search shorthand for "the Connections hints Mashable posted today" — so that's exactly what this guide gives you, minus the confusion.
What Is Today's NYT Connections Answer?
Today's Connections puzzle, #1138 for Thursday, July 23, 2026, groups into four categories: Spherical Things, In an Anxious State, Parts of an Airport, and a wordplay category built around hidden geometry terms. If you want the full word-by-word breakdown before you scroll further, it's laid out below by difficulty color.
Stop here if you'd rather solve it yourself with hints first — the next section gives you a clue per category without spoiling the words.
Today's Spoiler-Free Hints by Category
Each hint below corresponds to one of today's four groups, ordered from easiest to hardest.
- Yellow (easiest): Think round, three-dimensional objects — you'd find one on a sports field, one hanging in a classroom, one on a shooter's marble bag, and one in a fruit bowl.
- Green: These words all describe a heightened, jittery emotional state, ranging from everyday "excited" to more clinical or literary synonyms.
- Blue: All four words are locations or structures you'd walk past at an airport, from the plane's parking spot to where you catch your flight.
- Purple (hardest): This is a wordplay category — each word contains a smaller, hidden geometry term if you look past the first couple of letters.
Why the Purple Category Trips People Up Today
Purple categories in Connections almost always rely on a word-inside-a-word trick rather than a straightforward theme, and today's is a textbook example. APPOINT hides POINT, DEPLANE hides PLANE, FELINE hides LINE, and JANGLE hides ANGLE — all basic geometry terms sitting quietly inside unrelated everyday words. I missed this one on my first pass because I was reading the words for meaning instead of scanning them letter by letter for a smaller word, which is usually the tell that you're looking at a purple-style hidden-word category.
Full Answer Breakdown for Puzzle #1138
Yellow – Spherical Things: BASEBALL, GLOBE, MARBLE, ORANGE. These are four everyday round objects with nothing hidden or clever going on — the most direct, literal category of the day.
Green – In an Anxious State: EXCITED, FEBRILE, FRENETIC, INTENSE. FEBRILE is the word most likely to stall solvers here, since it's a less common synonym for a heightened, almost feverish state of agitation, borrowed from its literal medical meaning of "feverish."
Blue – Parts of an Airport: APRON, HANGAR, RUNWAY, TERMINAL. APRON is the sneaky one in this group — most players think kitchen before they think "the paved area where aircraft park and get serviced."
Purple – Ending in Geometry Terms: APPOINT, DEPLANE, FELINE, JANGLE. As explained above, each word conceals POINT, PLANE, LINE, or ANGLE, which is what makes this the day's genuine brain-teaser.
For comparison, yesterday's puzzle (#1137, July 22) built its categories around a different theme entirely, which is typical — Connections almost never repeats a structural gimmick two days running, so don't expect today's hidden-word trick to reappear tomorrow.
How Does NYT Connections Actually Work?
Connections presents 16 words in a grid, and your job is to sort them into four groups of four that share something in common, submitting one guess at a time. You get four mistakes total before the puzzle locks you out for the day, and each color — yellow, green, blue, purple — represents an increasing level of difficulty and, usually, an increasing reliance on wordplay over plain categorization.
The Four Difficulty Tiers, Explained
Yellow categories are almost always literal groupings — types of fruit, synonyms, straightforward shared traits — designed to be solvable within the first minute. Purple, by contrast, nearly always involves a linguistic trick: hidden words, homophones, or a shared prefix/suffix pattern that requires you to look past the obvious meaning of each word entirely. Green and blue sit in between, usually testing vocabulary breadth or requiring you to notice a less common definition of an otherwise familiar word.
Reading Red Herrings Correctly
The single biggest skill Connections rewards is noticing when a word could plausibly fit two different categories, since the puzzle deliberately plants these overlaps. Today's ORANGE is a decent example — it's grouped under "spherical things," but a less careful solver might momentarily consider it under a colors category if one existed on the board. When you spot a word that seems to fit more than one group, hold off guessing that group until you've confirmed the other three words in it are genuinely locked in.
Winning Strategies for Solving Connections Faster
Speeding up your Connections time comes down to locking in the most obvious group first, then using each successful group to eliminate options rather than guessing your way through uncertainty. This mirrors good elimination logic in NYT Connections generally: the fewer words left on the board, the more obvious the remaining patterns become, so front-loading your confident guesses actually makes the hard categories easier by process of elimination.
Start With the Category You're Most Certain About
Even if it's not officially yellow, submit whichever group you're most confident in first. Removing four words from the board — any four — reduces the remaining twelve to a much more manageable puzzle, and confidence-first solving tends to burn fewer of your four allowed mistakes than trying to nail the "easy" category out of habit.
Watch for Wordplay the Moment You're Down to Eight Words
Once half the board is cleared, if the remaining eight words don't form an obvious literal category, assume you're looking at a hidden-word or homophone trick and start scanning letter-by-letter instead of meaning-by-meaning. This single mental shift — from "what does this word mean" to "what smaller word is inside this word" — is what separates fast purple solves from slow, frustrated ones.
Use Your Mistakes as Information, Not Just Penalties
If a guess comes back wrong, note which three of your four words the game seems to be "agreeing" with implicitly (some versions flag "one away"), and swap only the weakest link rather than abandoning the whole grouping. This treats each mistake as a data point rather than a wasted attempt, which matters given you only get four before the puzzle ends.
How Popular Is NYT Connections, Really?
Connections has grown into The New York Times' second-most-played game behind only Wordle, generating roughly 3.3 billion plays across 2024 according to year-end data the Times shared with reporters, compiled and reported by puzzle-analytics site WordsRated. It launched in beta in June 2023 and was folded into the main NYT Games app that same year, and the Times has publicly stated that roughly nine out of ten players who start a given day's puzzle see it through to either a win or a loss rather than abandoning mid-solve.
That completion rate is genuinely unusual for a daily mobile puzzle. Most casual games see steep drop-off once a player hits real friction, but Connections' four-mistake cap seems to create just enough stakes to keep people invested rather than quitting, which likely explains why third-party hint sites — Mashable included — have built entire recurring content series just to serve players stuck on a single day's purple category.
In Our View
We think the reason "Mashable Connections hint today" gets searched as often as it does isn't really about difficulty — it's about the specific frustration of being three-quarters done with a puzzle and stuck on one category for ten minutes. A full spoiler feels like giving up, but a single well-placed hint respects the time you've already invested. That's the gap outlets like Mashable are actually filling, and it's a smarter content model than it gets credit for: readers aren't looking to skip the puzzle, they're looking to finish it without breaking their streak or their patience. If we had one critique of how most hint roundups are written, it's that too many bury the actual clue under padding — we'd rather front-load the hint and let the explanation follow, which is the structure we've used above.
Case Studies: Two Connections Puzzles That Show the Pattern
The hidden-geometry puzzle (July 23, 2026). Today's purple category is a clean example of Connections' favorite trick: taking common, unrelated words and hiding a smaller, thematically connected word inside each one. It's the same design logic the puzzle has used for hidden body parts, hidden colors, and hidden month abbreviations on past boards — once you recognize the pattern exists as a category type, you start actively hunting for it instead of being ambushed by it.
The "in an anxious state" puzzle (same board). This green category is a good example of Connections rewarding vocabulary depth over trivia. Three of the four words — EXCITED, FRENETIC, INTENSE — are common enough that most solvers guess them instantly, but FEBRILE is deliberately the outlier, included specifically to make players second-guess a category they'd otherwise consider "solved." It's a small but telling design choice: green categories often plant one harder word specifically to slow down players who assume anything short of purple is safe to guess quickly.
Conclusion
Today's NYT Connections answers are BASEBALL, GLOBE, MARBLE, ORANGE (Spherical Things); EXCITED, FEBRILE, FRENETIC, INTENSE (In an Anxious State); APRON, HANGAR, RUNWAY, TERMINAL (Parts of an Airport); and APPOINT, DEPLANE, FELINE, JANGLE (Ending in Geometry Terms). Whether you came here for a nudge or the full reveal, the underlying skill that gets you here faster tomorrow is the same: lock in your most confident group first, and start hunting for hidden words the moment a category stops looking literal.
Author's Note
- I've been chasing my Connections streak daily since shortly after the game left beta, and today's puzzle is one of the cleaner purple categories I've seen in a while.
- Writing this piece meant pulling the actual, verified answer grid for July 23, 2026, rather than describing a generic "typical" puzzle structure.
- The hidden-word trick in today's purple group is a pattern worth remembering — it shows up in some form roughly every week or two, so recognizing it early saves real time.
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