March 25, 2026 NYT Connections Puzzle #1018 Hints and Answers

Connections #1018 for March 25, 2026 is live, and today’s puzzle has a particularly devious purple category that will fool anyone who isn’t paying close attention to letter patterns. If you’re here for a nudge — or the full answer — you’re in the right place.

Play New York Times word games directly on the NYT site.

What Is NYT Connections?

NYT Connections is a daily word puzzle from the New York Times where players group 16 words into four categories of four. Each category shares a hidden “common thread” — it could be anything from magazine titles to types of payments to wordplay twists. The puzzle resets every day at midnight.

The game was developed with help from associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu and has become one of the most shared daily games on social media, right alongside Wordle.

How to Play

You are given 16 words and must sort them into four groups of four.
Each group has a hidden theme connecting all four words.
Select four words and tap “Submit” to check your guess.
A wrong guess counts as one mistake — you get four mistakes total before the game ends.
Groups are color-coded by difficulty: 🟨 Yellow (easiest) → 🟩 Green → 🟦 Blue → 🟪 Purple (hardest).
You can shuffle the board at any time to spot patterns more easily.

Category Hints — No Answers Yet

Not ready for the full spoiler? Here are vague hints for each color group:

🟨 Yellow: Think foggy thinking, unclear vision — what happens when things get murky.
🟩 Green: These four words are names you’d find on a newsstand, not in a dictionary.
🟦 Blue: These are all ways you might settle a bill or transfer money.
🟪 Purple: This one’s all about wordplay — think standard measurements, but something’s been swapped at the end.

Category Names — Getting Warmer

Still working it out? Here are the official category names for today’s puzzle without the words:

🟨 OBFUSCATE
🟩 MAGAZINES
🟦 PAYMENT METHODS
🟪 UNITS OF VOLUME WITH LAST LETTER CHANGED

Full Answers — Connections #1018, March 25, 2026

Ready for the complete solution? Here it is:

🟨 OBFUSCATE: BLUR, CLOUD, MUDDY, OBSCURE
🟩 MAGAZINES: FORTUNE, PEOPLE, SPIN, TIME
🟦 PAYMENT METHODS: CASH, CHARGE, CHECK, WIRE
🟪 UNITS OF VOLUME WITH LAST LETTER CHANGED: CUR, GALLOP, PING, QUARK

What Made Today Tricky

The purple category is the clear standout today. GALLOP, PING, QUARK, and CUR look completely unrelated on the surface — one’s a horse’s gait, one’s a sound, one’s a subatomic particle, and one’s an insult. But the trick is that each word is a unit of volume with its final letter swapped: GALLON → GALLOP, PINT → PING, QUART → QUARK, CUP → CUR. It’s a classic NYT misdirection that punishes players who focus on the obvious meanings.

The green MAGAZINES category also had trap potential. TIME and FORTUNE can easily feel like abstract nouns (“fortune,” “time”), and SPIN could fool players into thinking it belongs with action words. PEOPLE is perhaps the most immediately obvious, but even that could masquerade as a category for “groups of humans.”

In the blue group, CHARGE and CHECK both have financial meanings but also entirely unrelated everyday uses — a phone charge, or checking in somewhere — making it easy to misplace them if you’re not careful.

Tips for Today’s Puzzle

Start with magazines. FORTUNE, PEOPLE, and TIME are strong anchors once you stop reading them as common words. SPIN is the wildcard that clicks once you have the other three.
The purple category is wordplay, not meaning. Don’t try to find what CUR, GALLOP, PING, and QUARK have in common semantically — look at the letters. Each one is a unit of volume (CUP, GALLON, PINT, QUART) with the last letter replaced.
Lock down PAYMENT METHODS early. CASH, CHARGE, CHECK, and WIRE are a clean, unambiguous group. Confirming them quickly clears the board and helps isolate the trickier categories.
Obfuscate is the cleanest group once you know the theme. BLUR, CLOUD, MUDDY, and OBSCURE all mean to make something unclear or difficult to understand. If you know the word “obfuscate,” this category is free points.

More Daily Puzzle Help

Looking for more puzzles from dotwordle.com? Here are recent Connections solutions and other daily game answers:

Shahid Maqsood

Shahid Maqsood is a digital entrepreneur and SEO specialist focused on building engaging web experiences. He is the creator of DotWordle, combining creativity with smart, user-friendly design.