Updated

Updated · Lifehacker · Aug 24

NYT Connections #1,170 Reveals 4 Categories for August 24, Including Fish and Wrestling Lingo

Updated

Updated · Lifehacker · Aug 24

NYT Connections #1,170 Reveals 4 Categories for August 24, Including Fish and Wrestling Lingo

Q: What makes the purple category's tennis wordplay in today's Connections puzzle so uniquely challenging?

What makes the purple category uniquely challenging is that it depends on a two-step sound puzzle, not a normal meaning-based connection. Solvers have to hear each entry as a letter homophone followed by a tennis term: **BESET** becomes **B + set**, **DESERVE** becomes **D + serve**, **EX-LOVE** becomes **X + love**, and **EYELET** becomes **I + let**. That is harder than the other groups because the words do not belong together by definition, topic, or obvious usage. They look like ordinary standalone words or phrases, so the link only appears when players shift from reading to listening. In Connections, that kind of phonetic wordplay is often reserved for the purple group, but this one is especially tricky because it also requires some tennis vocabulary knowledge, including terms like **love**, **set**, **serve**, and **let**. The board also increased the difficulty by planting strong red herrings. **EYELET**, **HEEL**, **SOLE**, and **ARCH** could easily suggest shoes or feet, pulling attention away from the sound-based pattern. **EX-LOVE** is particularly deceptive because it looks like a relationship phrase rather than a sports clue. In practice, this category was toughest because players had to recognize pronunciation, sports terminology, and misdirection all at once.

Q: How did a clever shoe disguise and niche wrestling jargon trick NYT Connections players today?

Players were mainly tripped up by a false “shoe” pattern and by specialized pro-wrestling vocabulary. In Monday’s NYT Connections No. 1,170, words like **SOLE, ARCH, HEEL,** and **EYELET** looked as if they belonged together as parts of a shoe or foot. That was the puzzle’s smartest disguise: each of those words actually belonged to different groups. **SOLE** was in **fish**, **ARCH** in **principal**, **HEEL** in **pro-wrestling lingo**, and **EYELET** in the purple wordplay set. That overlap pushed many solvers toward an attractive but wrong grouping. The blue category added another layer of difficulty because it relied on insider wrestling terms rather than everyday vocabulary. **FACE** and **HEEL** are standard wrestling labels for hero and villain, but **JOBBER**—a wrestler who usually loses to build up others—and **KAYFABE**—the tradition of treating scripted storylines as real—were much less familiar to non-fans. Those niche terms often made the category hard to confirm until late in the solve. Other red herrings reinforced the confusion. **MULLET** could suggest the hairstyle rather than the fish, and **EX-LOVE** looked odd until solvers recognized the purple pattern: letter homophone plus tennis term, as in **B + set**, **D + serve**, **X + love**, and **I + let**. The cleanest path was to spot the fish group early, then the synonyms for “principal,” leaving the wrestling jargon and the tennis-based wordplay to sort out the rest.

3 articles · Updated · Lifehacker · Aug 24

Puzzle #1,170’s published solution groups the 16 words into FISH, PRINCIPAL, PRO-WRESTLING LINGO, and LETTER HOMOPHONE PLUS TENNIS TERM.
Yellow answers were MULLET, PIKE, SOLE, and TANG, while green used ARCH, CHIEF, MAIN, and PRIME for the theme PRINCIPAL.
Blue centered on wrestling terms—FACE, HEEL, JOBBER, and KAYFABE—while purple paired letter-sound openings with tennis endings in BESET, DESERVE, EX-LOVE, and EYELET.
The hints flagged several traps, especially SOLE, ARCH, EYELET, and HEEL suggesting shoes or feet, and MULLET appearing as a fish rather than a hairstyle.
The report also walked readers through one solving path and restated Connections rules, where players sort 16 tiles into 4 linked groups before making 4 mistakes.