NYT Connections Hints and Answers for Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026 (#1232): Pasta, Toms and Things You Snap

Today’s Connections from The New York Times (NYT) is puzzle #1232, for Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026. Four entries read like body parts and a few others sound like famous people, which is where most mistakes come from. 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

Boost, Bow Tie, Elbow, Fingers, Football, Glow Stick, Palm, Pocket, Ripley, Rubber Band, Sawyer, Shell, Swift, Swipe, Thumb, Wagon Wheel

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: Something done quietly to an item that belongs to someone else.
• Hint 2: Four verbs for taking without asking, one of which also means to push upward.

Green

• Hint 1: Look in the pasta aisle.
• Hint 2: Four shapes named after a bent arm joint, a tie worn at a formal dinner, an ocean find and a cart part.

Blue

• Hint 1: Characters who share a first name.
• Hint 2: A con man from a crime novel, a boy who talks friends into painting a fence, an inventor-hero of adventure books and a fairy-tale boy no bigger than a thumb.

Purple

• Hint 1: Each one can be snapped, though not in the same way.
• Hint 2: A finger gesture, a toy that lights up when bent, a stretchy loop and a quick move at the start of a play in a ball game.

Solving tips

Four entries suggest body parts, and none of those four is a real group. Start with pasta, because all four shapes are familiar and nothing else fits. Leave the Toms for after yellow, since Swift is the entry most likely to tempt you into a wrong guess.

Keep a streak log on our printable weekly calendar or the October 2026 printable calendar.

More of today’s puzzles: Wordle hints, Strands hints and Quordle hints.

Today’s Connections answers (spoilers)

Stop here if you still want to solve it yourself.

• Yellow, Steal: Boost, Palm, Pocket, Swipe
• Green, Pasta Shapes: Bow Tie, Elbow, Shell, Wagon Wheel
• Blue, Fictional Toms: Ripley, Sawyer, Swift, Thumb
• Purple, Things That Can Be Snapped: Fingers, Football, Glow Stick, Rubber Band

Why the traps worked

The body parts. Palm, Elbow, Fingers and Thumb look like one group. Palm means to steal, Elbow is a pasta shape, Fingers can be snapped, and Thumb is Tom Thumb, the fairy-tale character.

Swift. It suggests a singer or a bird. Here it is Tom Swift, the inventor-hero of a long-running series of adventure novels.

Football. The ball is snapped to the quarterback at the start of a play, so it joins fingers, glow sticks and rubber bands in the purple group.

We checked the solution against more than one published source before posting. Puzzle #1233 arrives at midnight.