Connections Hint and Answers Today (#1243, November 5, 2026)
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle, #1243 for Thursday, November 5, 2026, is a board full of words that want to belong somewhere else. The easy group falls quickly once you spot it, the middle two reward anyone who thinks in pictures instead of definitions, and the purple group is pure wordplay that most players only see after everything else is solved. 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 #1243:
- RAINDROP
- ROSE
- WHISKER
- KITTEN
- GIG
- PEAR
- SPIKE
- NARCISSUS
- WEDGE
- RUN
- LOTUS
- UVULA
- BRANDO
- ANEMONE
- SPEEDBAG
- PLATFORM
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
Open a shoe closet and look at the bottom of the footwear. Four of today’s words are different ways a shoe can lift your foot off the ground, from a short slim one to a tall solid one.
Green hint
Take a slow walk through a garden in bloom. Four of today’s words name flowers you could plant, and one of them is also the name of a figure from Greek myth who fell in love with his own reflection.
Blue hint
Forget what the words mean and look at their shapes instead. Four of today’s words describe things that are all shaped like a drop of water, even though they come from completely different parts of life, from fruit to the gym to the back of your throat.
Purple hint
Read each leftover word out loud and change only its very last letter. Four of today’s words each turn into the name of a liquor once you swap that final letter, and what is left behind is a real word or a famous name.
Spoiler warning
Stop here if you want to keep solving on your own. The complete solved board for Connections #1243, with all four category names and explanations, is directly below.
Today’s Connections answers
Yellow: KINDS OF HEELS
KITTEN, PLATFORM, SPIKE, WEDGE
Each of these is a type of shoe heel. A kitten heel is short and slim, usually under two inches, while a spike heel is tall and thin, a platform lifts the whole sole, and a wedge runs solid from heel to toe. This is the group most players find first, and locking it in early clears the board nicely.
Green: FLOWERS
ANEMONE, LOTUS, NARCISSUS, ROSE
Four blooms you could plant in a garden. The narcissus is the plant group that includes daffodils and paperwhites, the lotus is a water flower, the anemone is also known as the windflower, and the rose needs no introduction. The traps here are ANEMONE, which also names a sea creature, and NARCISSUS, which pulls toward mythology.
Blue: TEARDROP-SHAPED THINGS
PEAR, RAINDROP, SPEEDBAG, UVULA
Each of these is shaped like a teardrop. A pear narrows toward the stem, a raindrop is the classic example, a speed bag is the small teardrop-shaped bag that boxers hit in a quick rhythm, and the uvula is the small piece of tissue that hangs from the back of the soft palate. This group is sneakier than it looks because every word comes from a different world, and the only thing linking them is their outline.
Purple: LIQUORS WITH LAST LETTERS CHANGED
BRANDO, GIG, RUN, WHISKER
The wordplay group. Each word becomes a liquor when you change only its final letter: BRANDO becomes brandy, GIG becomes gin, RUN becomes rum, and WHISKER becomes whiskey. WHISKER is the giveaway once you see it, because it sits so close to whiskey that the answer is hiding in plain sight.
How the board tried to trick you
Today’s puzzle leans on words that point in two directions at once. KITTEN sits beside WHISKER and begs to be read as a cat word, while WHISKER belongs in purple. SPIKE can mean a cluster of blossoms, so it pulls hard toward the flower group, and WEDGE looks like it belongs with shapes after appearing in a shape group only yesterday. ROSE can be a verb, RUN can be almost anything, and GIG can be a concert. The board rewards players who solve the flower group early, because once ANEMONE, LOTUS, NARCISSUS, and ROSE leave the grid, the heel group stands out much more clearly.
Tips for tomorrow’s puzzle
- Say the words out loud. Purple groups often hide sounds and word beginnings that your eyes skip over.
- Look for words that feel incomplete. A word like BRANDO, sitting oddly on the board, is often a familiar name with one letter changed.
- 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 #1244 here tomorrow. Good luck with the board.
