NYT Connections puzzle #842, dated September 30, 2025, is an archived grid, so this guide is for players working through it after the fact or checking an answer they already have. The four hints below are ordered from broad to specific. Stop at whichever one gets you unstuck, and the category names and full answer set follow after.
Hints before answers
- Hint 1: One group describes behavior that looks unnatural or forced, the kind of movement or speech that seems rehearsed.
- Hint 2: Another group comes from a well-known tongue twister. Think of the lines a child might recite for fun.
- Hint 3: A third group is made of animated characters, and all of them are birds or fowl.
- Hint 4: The last group is built on sound rather than meaning. Say each word aloud and listen to how it ends.
Category names and answers
If the hints were not enough, the groups are below. Each row lists the category and the four words that belong to it. The colors follow the standard Connections difficulty order used in the puzzle guide this key comes from.
| Color | Category | Words |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow | Unnatural, as mannerisms | AWKWARD, STIFF, STILTED, WOODEN |
| Green | Words in a famous tongue twister | CHUCK, COULD, WOOD, WOODCHUCK |
| Blue | Cartoon birds | FOGHORN, SCROOGE, WOODSTOCK, WOODY |
| Purple | Ending with number homophones | CLASSICS, CREATE, GUTHRIE, THEREFORE |
How each group works
Yellow: unnatural, as mannerisms
AWKWARD, STIFF, STILTED and WOODEN all describe movement or speech that lacks ease. WOODEN is the word most likely to mislead, because it also fits the wood-themed words in other groups.
Green: words in a famous tongue twister
The tongue twister is the familiar question about how much wood a woodchuck could chuck. CHUCK, COULD, WOOD and WOODCHUCK all appear in that line.
#1 Best Overall
Blue: cartoon birds
FOGHORN (Foghorn Leghorn, a rooster), WOODSTOCK (the bird from the Peanuts comics), WOODY (Woody Woodpecker) and SCROOGE (Scrooge McDuck, a duck) are animated birds. Each name is a character, not a generic word.
Purple: ending with number homophones
Each word ends in a sound that matches a number: CLASSICS ends like “six,” CREATE like “eight,” GUTHRIE like “three,” and THEREFORE like “four.” This is the group that rewards reading the words aloud rather than looking at their spelling.
Rank #2
The red herring: five WOOD words
The grid contains five words built on WOOD: WOOD, WOODCHUCK, WOODSTOCK, WOODY and WOODEN. Only the wood-based words in the green and blue groups belong together with their categories, and WOODEN belongs to the yellow group. Players who lock in a group because of the shared spelling often end up with one wrong group, so it is worth confirming the category before committing.
How hard this grid was
The puzzle guide that supplies this answer key rates the grid 3 out of 5 for difficulty. That rating is the outlet’s subjective assessment, not an official NYT figure. The same guide labels yellow as the easiest group and purple as the hardest, and that ordering is also the outlet’s view rather than a published NYT ranking.
Limits of this answer key
The category names and word groups here come from a single puzzle guide published on September 30, 2025. This page does not reproduce the full 16-tile board, and the answers have not been checked against NYT’s own published solution. If your grid differs from the words listed above, check it against the official NYT Games puzzle for that date before assuming an error.
Access to older Connections puzzles depends on your NYT Games account and subscription terms, and those terms are not confirmed here.
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