NYT Connections Hints and Answers for Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026 (#1228): Paintings, Games and Misnomers

Today’s Connections from The New York Times (NYT) is puzzle #1228, for Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026. Many of the 16 entries are two-word phrases, and a handful sound edible, which is the trap. Below are two levels of hints for each color, then the full solution and an explanation of the overlaps in a marked spoiler section.

Today’s 16 words

English Horn, Leapfrog, Alpha Dog, Sweetbread, Hot Potato, Mantis Shrimp, Sunflowers, Big Cheese, American Gothic, Grape-Nuts, Campbell’s Soup Can, Duck Duck Goose, Top Banana, The Scream, Musical Chairs, Heavyweight

How the game works

Sort the 16 entries into four groups of four. You can make four mistakes. Yellow is usually the easiest group, then green and blue; purple is the trickiest and often depends on wordplay.

Hints for each group

Yellow

• Hint 1: Recess and birthday parties.
• Hint 2: One involves tapping heads in a circle, one has you jump over a friend’s back, one ends when the music stops.

Green

• Hint 1: The person in charge.
• Hint 2: Four slang terms for a very important person, one from boxing and one from vaudeville comedy.

Blue

• Hint 1: Look in a museum.
• Hint 2: Works by Grant Wood, Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

Purple

• Hint 1: Don’t trust the names.
• Hint 2: In each one, both words are inaccurate: a breakfast cereal, a woodwind, an ocean crustacean and an organ meat.

Solving tips

Four entries mention animals and several sound like food, and neither link is a real group. The paintings group is the safest place to start, since every title names a specific famous work. Leave purple for last; it falls into place once the people-in-charge group is out.

Today the Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight; see Orionid viewing times by city. Keep a streak log on our printable weekly calendar.

More of today’s puzzles: Wordle hints, Strands hints, Mini Crossword answers, Quordle hints, Contexto hints and Blossom answers.

Today’s Connections answers (spoilers)

Stop here if you still want to solve it yourself.

• Yellow, Classic Children’s Games: Duck Duck Goose, Hot Potato, Leapfrog, Musical Chairs
• Green, Important Person: Alpha Dog, Big Cheese, Heavyweight, Top Banana
• Blue, Famous Paintings: American Gothic, Campbell’s Soup Can, Sunflowers, The Scream
• Purple, Double Misnomers (neither word is an accurate description): English Horn, Grape-Nuts, Mantis Shrimp, Sweetbread

Why the traps worked

The food words. Big Cheese, Top Banana, Hot Potato, Sweetbread and Grape-Nuts all sound like a menu, but they land in three different groups: two are slang for a boss, one is a party game and two are misnomers.

The animals. Alpha Dog, Leapfrog, Duck Duck Goose and Mantis Shrimp look like a zoo group. Only Mantis Shrimp is a real animal name, and it is wrong twice: the creature is neither a mantis nor a shrimp.

The misnomers. Grape-Nuts cereal contains neither grapes nor nuts. Sweetbread is neither sweet nor bread; it is the thymus or pancreas of a calf or lamb. The English horn is a woodwind in the oboe family, neither English nor a horn.

Heavyweight. It suggests boxing, but here it means an important, influential person.

We checked the solution against more than one published source before posting. Puzzle #1229 arrives at midnight.

Missed yesterday’s puzzle? See Connections hints for #1227.