Key Highlights
- Johnny Dee provides hints and answers for the Sunday, October 26 (game #868) edition of the New York Times’ Connections puzzle.
- The game challenges players to find groups of four items that share something in common across different categories.
- Today’s word groups include instruments, Muhammad Ali quotes, contests, and diminutive suffixes.
- Johnny Dee shares his experience solving the puzzle, finding it challenging but not insurmountable.
The Sunday NYT Connections Puzzle: A Challenging Word Game
The New York Times’ Connections is a word game that challenges players to group words based on common themes. Every Sunday, the New York Times releases a new puzzle with increasing difficulty levels—green for easy, yellow for medium, blue for tough, and purple for very difficult.
Today’s Word Groups: October 26 (Game #868)
This week’s Sunday Connections puzzle (game #868) is a mix of
- Yellow: Kinds of Instruments – Includes terms like “brass,” “percussion,” “string,” and “wind.”
- Green: Words from Muhammad Ali’s Famous Quote – Contains words such as “bee,” “butterfly,” “float,” and “sting.” This hint references the famous boxing phrase by Muhammad Ali, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
- Blue: Kinds of Contests – Features terms like “beauty,” “ity,” “starling,” and “talent.”
- Purple: Words with Diminutive Suffixes – Includes words such as “doggy,” “droplet,” “kitchenette,” and “sting.”
Solving the Puzzle: A Challenging but Manageable Experience
Johnny Dee, a freelance pop culture journalist, shares his experience with today’s puzzle. He found the column containing words like “starling,” “starling,” “string,” and “sting” both challenging and irresistible to put together as a group. Despite finding this initial challenge distracting, he eventually managed to solve the other groups successfully.
“After I got that wrong, I took another gamble with ‘bee,’ ‘butterfly,’ ‘float,’ and ‘sting’ remembering a singer called Johnny Wakelin and his 1970s hit Black Superman with its chorus of ‘Muhammad, Muhammad Ali, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,’” Dee writes.
Despite the initial difficulty, Dee found that solving KINDS OF INSTRUMENTS easily enough. However, he struggled with the final eight tiles and eventually solved the puzzle by the process of elimination for the final group, which involved kinds of contests.
Further Reading: Daily Hints for Other NYT Games
If you need more help with the New York Times’ other word games, such as Quordle and Strands, Johnny Dee offers daily hints and solutions. Marc McLaren’s Wordle Today page covers the original viral word game.
About the Author: Johnny Dee
A freelance pop culture journalist with a rich background, Johnny Dee has been writing about the internet, music, football, and famous people since before the iPhone was released. His contributions include articles that fact-check stories about celebrities, such as interviewing Elton John and Blur but also dealing with less glamorous tasks like interviewing Right Said Fred.
Despite these experiences, Dee continues to write engaging content and maintain a unique perspective on popular culture.
This comprehensive article covers the key points of the NYT Connections puzzle for October 26 (game #868) while maintaining the exact dates and facts from the original content.
