Connections Hint and Answers Today (#1238, October 31, 2026)
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle, #1238 for Saturday, October 31, 2026, is a board that rewards two very different skills: hearing slang the way it is actually spoken, and reading words as fragments of longer phrases. The easy group clicks the moment you hear a teenager praise something, the middle groups reward anyone who pictures a cocktail bar and a puppet stage, and the hardest group is a wordplay puzzle hiding inside ordinary-looking words. If you are stuck with mistakes running low, use the category hints below in order, from yellow to purple, and only scroll to the full answers when you are ready. Each hint spoils a little more than the one before it.
Today’s 16 words
Here is the full board for puzzle #1238:
- DIRTY
- DOWNFALL
- DRY
- GNARLY
- GUITAR
- KILLER
- MARIONETTE
- SHAKEN
- SHAKESPEARE
- SICK
- SITCOM
- STAYCATION
- TASSEL
- TENNIS RACKET
- UP
- WICKED
Category hints (no answers yet)
Work through these in order. Yellow is the group Connections intends to be the most straightforward, and purple is the trickiest.
Yellow hint
Think of slang where a word that sounds nasty or menacing is actually high praise. Four of today’s words are compliments in disguise: one sounds like a disease, one sounds like a murderer, one sounds like a surfer wipeout, and one sounds like something evil.
Green hint
Picture a cocktail bar. Four of today’s words are ways to specify how a martini is made: how much olive brine goes in, how little vermouth is used, whether it is stirred or agitated, and which direction the glass goes.
Blue hint
Look for strings. Four of today’s words are things that have strings: a musical instrument, a puppet worked by cords, a dangling cord ornament, and a piece of sports equipment strung with gut or synthetic cord.
Purple hint
Read only the start of each word. Four of today’s words begin with a command you might give a dog: one tells it to lie down, one tells it to offer a paw, one tells it to sit, and one tells it to remain where it is.
Spoiler warning
Stop here if you want to keep solving on your own. The complete solved board for Connections #1238, with all four category names and explanations, is directly below.
Today’s Connections answers
Yellow: WORDS MEANING GOOD THAT SOUND BAD
GNARLY, KILLER, SICK, WICKED
In slang, all four are praise: a gnarly trick is impressive, a killer performance is excellent, sick means amazing, and wicked means very good, especially in New England slang. This is the group most players find first, because the slang meanings are so common that the four words feel like they belong together even before the category name clicks.
Green: MARTINI SPECIFICATIONS
DIRTY, DRY, SHAKEN, UP
Each word is a way to order a martini: dirty means made with olive brine, dry means made with very little vermouth, shaken means agitated with ice rather than stirred, and up means served chilled in a stemmed glass without ice. The traps here are SHAKEN, which also points toward the purple group through SHAKESPEARE, and UP, which looks like an ordinary direction until the cocktail link clicks.
Blue: THINGS WITH STRINGS
GUITAR, MARIONETTE, TASSEL, TENNIS RACKET
The guitar has strings you pluck, the marionette is a puppet worked by strings, the tassel hangs from a cord, and the tennis racket is strung with cord across its frame. This group rewards players who think about physical strings rather than word meanings: TASSEL looks like decoration and TENNIS RACKET looks like sports equipment until the string connection ties them together.
Purple: STARTING WITH DOG COMMANDS
DOWNFALL, SHAKESPEARE, SITCOM, STAYCATION
The wordplay group. Each word starts with a dog command: DOWNFALL starts with DOWN, SHAKESPEARE starts with SHAKE, SITCOM starts with SIT, and STAYCATION starts with STAY. Once you start reading only the first few letters of each leftover word instead of looking for a shared topic, this group falls into place fast.
How the board tried to trick you
Today’s puzzle leans on words whose everyday meanings pull hard in the wrong direction. SHAKEN looks like it belongs with SHAKESPEARE, yet the two sit in different groups, and DOWNFALL looks like a word about ruin until you notice the dog command hiding at its start. SICK and WICKED read as negative words, which is exactly the joke of the yellow group, and UP looks too small and plain to belong anywhere until the martini order clicks. The board rewards players who solve the slang group early, because once those four words leave the grid, the cocktail cluster and the string cluster stand out much more clearly, and the leftover words start to read as dog commands.
Tips for tomorrow’s puzzle
- Say the words out loud. Purple groups often hide sounds, fragments, and word beginnings that your eyes skip over.
- Look for words that feel incomplete. A word that only makes sense after another word, like a cocktail specification, is often part of a bigger phrase.
- Hold your guesses. You only get four mistakes, so test a group in your head against all four words before you submit it.
- Beware the obvious cluster. If five words seem to fit one theme, at least one of them belongs somewhere else.
Connections resets at midnight local time, and we will have hints and answers for #1239 here tomorrow. Good luck with the board.
