We Need to Talk About Wednesday’s Doggone Connections Puzzle

Players are barking about the Connections puzzle, for good reason. Oscar Wong/Getty Images

Long ago, the New York Times Connections puzzle replaced Wordle as my favorite online puzzle. But the Connections puzzle for Wednesday is a real dog fight to solve. Spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t played Connections yet, do that now.

In Connections, you sort 16 words into four related categories. And in Wednesday’s puzzle, fully half of the words can precede the word “dog.”

Here come those spoilers.

Corn dog. Hunting dog. Sheep dog. Rescue dog. Salty dog, Prairie dog. Top dog. And even though this one is a bit of a stretch, “sausage dog.”

Also, the unsorted grid begins with the words BOW and WOW, which fall into different categories.

Good luck sorting those eight dog words into the two groups that the Times puzzle editors intended! Here’s the answer grid filled out properly.

The completed NYT Connections puzzle for Sept. 2, 2026. NYT/Screenshot by CNET

So the puzzle-makers first divided the “dog” words into a category relating to real, four-legged canines: hunting, rescue, sheep and that questionable “sausage,” which I guess means dachshund.

And then the remaining four dog words went into the purple category, where they fit alongside other words that aren’t real canines at all, including one food (corn dog), one animal (prairie dog), and two slangy expressions (salty dog and top dog).

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