NYT Connections continues to captivate puzzle enthusiasts with its clever word-association challenges. The January 24 edition, puzzle number 958, presents a particularly tricky set of categories that will test even seasoned players. This detailed breakdown offers strategic hints followed by the complete solutions, helping you understand the logic behind each grouping while preserving the satisfaction of solving future puzzles independently.
Understanding the Game's Evolution
The New York Times has transformed Connections into a daily ritual for thousands, complete with a sophisticated scoring system that tracks your performance over time. Similar to their Wordle bot, the Connections Bot analyzes your gameplay after completion, providing a numeric score and detailed feedback on your choices. Registered users can monitor their progress through comprehensive statistics including total puzzles completed, win rate, perfect score frequency, and current streak. This gamification element adds depth beyond the daily solve, encouraging strategic improvement and pattern recognition.
Strategic Hint Breakdown
For those who prefer gradual assistance, we've organized hints from simplest to most complex, mirroring the puzzle's color-coded difficulty system.
The yellow category offers the most accessible entry point. Today's theme centers on equipment associated with a specific sport. Consider what a professional athlete in a combat sport would wear during competition. The items are universal to the discipline and include protective gear, apparel, and specialized accessories. Think about what you see when watching matches on television—the essential kit that defines the athlete's appearance and safety.
Moving to the green category, the theme celebrates victory and achievement. These words represent symbols of supremacy across various competitive contexts. They can be tangible objects, ceremonial headwear, or abstract concepts that denote being the best. Each term functions as a reward for excellence, applicable to sports, academics, entertainment, or any field where someone emerges victorious. The words share a common thread of representing the pinnacle of success.
The blue category delves into fashion terminology, specifically focusing on design elements found in clothing. These words describe different styles of a particular garment feature that varies widely across outfits. From casual wear to formal attire, these variations affect both aesthetics and functionality. Consider how necklines dramatically alter a shirt or dress's appearance, creating distinct silhouettes that designers manipulate for different effects. The terms are all common in both everyday shopping and haute couture discussions.
Finally, the purple category presents the day's greatest challenge, as usual. This grouping uses a fill-in-the-blank format where each answer completes a compound word or common phrase beginning with "snow." The connections are semantic rather than categorical, requiring lateral thinking about how each term pairs with the wintery prefix. Some combinations represent objects, others describe animals, and one refers to a weather phenomenon. The diversity of the completed phrases makes this category particularly elusive.
Complete Answer Reveal
If you're ready to see the full solutions, here are the four groups for January 24, 2026:
The yellow group, themed "gear for a boxer," contains: gloves, mouthguard, robe, and shorts. These four items constitute the standard uniform and protective equipment for professional boxers. The robe is worn during entrance and between rounds, while gloves, mouthguard, and shorts are mandatory during the fight itself.
The green group, themed "championship," includes: award, crown, cup, and title. Each term represents a form of recognition for being the best in a competitive arena. A crown symbolizes royal victory, a cup is a physical trophy, an award is a formal recognition, and a title denotes the champion's status.
The blue group, themed "kinds of necklines," features: boat, crew, halter, and scoop. These describe distinct collar styles found in t-shirts, dresses, and sweaters. A boat neck runs horizontally across the collarbone, crew is a standard round neckline, halter ties behind the neck, and scoop is a deeper, curved cut.
The purple group, following the "snow ____" pattern, comprises: cone, globe, leopard, and pea. These complete as snow cone (a frozen treat), snow globe (a decorative object), snow leopard (a mountain cat), and snow pea (a vegetable variety). The diversity of these compounds explains why this category often stumps solvers.
Pattern Recognition for Future Success
Analyzing today's puzzle reveals several recurring strategies that can improve your performance. First, physical equipment categories often group items by sport or profession, so consider the complete toolkit for any given activity. Second, abstract concept categories like championship require thinking about synonyms and symbols that represent broader ideas. Third, technical terminology categories such as necklines demand specialized knowledge from fields like fashion, architecture, or cuisine. Finally, compound word categories frequently use the fill-in-the-blank structure, so always test if words pair with common prefixes or suffixes.
The article also references several historically difficult puzzles that demonstrate these patterns. One memorable puzzle grouped "things you can set" including mood, record, table, and volleyball—showing how verbs can have surprisingly diverse objects. Another challenged solvers with "one in a dozen" (egg, juror, month, rose), playing on the double meaning of "dozen" as twelve and a group of twelve. The "streets on screen" category (Elm, Fear, Jump, Sesame) cleverly used proper nouns from horror and children's entertainment. The "power ___" format (nap, plant, Ranger, trip) demonstrated how a single prefix creates entirely different meanings. Most ingeniously, "things that can run" (candidate, faucet, mascara, nose) showed how a simple verb can connect wildly different nouns through shared functionality.
Advanced Solving Techniques
To elevate your gameplay, develop a systematic approach. Begin by scanning for obvious proper nouns that might share a theme—brands, movies, celebrities, or places. Next, identify potential compound word candidates by mentally testing common prefixes and suffixes. Then, look for technical jargon from specific domains like sports, fashion, or science. Finally, consider abstract relationships where words function similarly in sentences despite different meanings.
The purple category's difficulty stems from its reliance on cultural knowledge rather than logical deduction. Snow leopard and snow pea are less immediately obvious than snow cone and snow globe. This teaches an important lesson: NYT Connections rewards broad general knowledge as much as linguistic skill. Regular solvers should stay curious about diverse topics from zoology to botany to culinary arts.
Community and Continuous Learning
The puzzle's integration with the Times Games ecosystem creates a vibrant community of solvers who share strategies and discuss daily challenges. The ability to track personal statistics transforms a simple word game into a long-term skill-building exercise. Players learn to recognize their own cognitive biases and blind spots—perhaps you excel at sports categories but struggle with fashion terms, or vice versa.
Today's puzzle exemplifies why Connections has become a cultural phenomenon. It balances accessibility with challenge, offering multiple entry points while reserving its deepest difficulty for the final category. The satisfaction of correctly grouping all sixteen words provides a genuine mental workout that many find more rewarding than passive entertainment.
Final Thoughts
Whether you solved today's puzzle independently or needed these hints, the key is learning from each experience. Notice how your brain processes different category types. Did you spot the boxing gear immediately, or did the mouthguard throw you off? Did fashion knowledge help with necklines, or was that your stumbling block? Each puzzle is a diagnostic tool for your pattern recognition abilities.
Keep practicing, review the Connections Bot feedback, and don't be discouraged by challenging days. The purple category is designed to be elusive—that's what makes finally cracking it so satisfying. Tomorrow brings sixteen new words and fresh opportunities to sharpen your mental agility. The connections are always there, waiting for you to discover them.