NYT Connections hints and answers, Wednesday Feb 26

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Sunday 27th April!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Wednesday, 26th February? The four themes are fickle; one day, they're ridiculously easy to spot, but the next, they're nigh impossible to understand. If you're grasping at straws today, let us help you out.

There's no need to give up on your Connections challenge with this handy guide: pick a hint, choose a small spoiler, and try again!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Wednesday 26th February
• What are today's Connections groups?
• What are today's Connections answers?

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

How to play Connections

Connections is one of the most popular (and challenging) daily puzzle games published by the New York Times (owners of Wordle). The aim of Connections is to group the 16 words of the day into four groups, where each group of four words has a common theme.

For instance, the words "Hook", "Nana", "Peter", and "Wendy" are all Peter Pan characters. Or to take another example, "Action", "Ballpark", "Go", and "Stick" are all words which commonly come just before the word "Figure".

Your job is to figure out what these themes are that connect the various words together - but be wary, because a lot of the time there are deceptive red herring connections placed purely to throw you off! To win the game, you have to find all four Connections without making 4 mistakes. On your fourth mistake, the game is over and the answer is revealed automatically.

Each of the four groups in each day's Connections puzzle is also assigned a different colour, which represents how easy or difficult the Connection is to find. These colours are: Yellow (Easiest), Green (Easy), Blue (Medium), and Purple (Hardest).

Click here to play today's Connections puzzle!

Connections hint for Wednesday 26th February

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: If you want something, you've got to consider the [...]
• Green: These words are similar to 'used to be'.
• Blue: Think of marks used in writing.
• Purple: This theme is about a television family.
• Extra hint 1: The purple group has something to do with names.
• Extra hint 2: Each group except blue contains a word starting with 'p'.

If you need a bit more help, tap the spoiler text below to reveal one word belonging to each group:

• Yellow:Charge
• Green:Late
• Blue:Dash
• Purple:Comer

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections groups are revealed just below!

What are today's Connections groups?

If you need an even bigger clue to figure out today's Connections puzzle, below we'll reveal the four correct Connections groups - the themes which link together each set of four words in the Connections grid.

Here are the Connections groups for today:

• Yellow: Expenditure
• Green: Onetime
• Blue: Made With Horizontal Lines
• Purple: Simpson Family Members With First Letter Changed

Now that you know the themes for the various different Connections in today's puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check below for the full answer.

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections answer lies ahead!

What is today's Connections answer?

Here is the answer to today's Connections puzzle on Wednesday, 26th February:

• Yellow: Expenditure (Charge, Cost, Price, Rate)
• Green: Onetime (Former, Late, Past, Prior)
• Blue: Made With Horizontal Lines (Dash, Hyphen, Minus, Underscore)
• Purple: Simpson Family Members With First Letter Changed (Baggie, Barge, Comer, Pisa)

Oh no, not the Simpsons again... Is it just me, or does this show get featured very often in the Connections puzzles? Pity for me, because I haven't watched it and could therefore never, ever solve today's purple theme. Luckily, the NYT seemed to understand the difficulty that non-Simpsons fans might have, so the other three themes are based on common knowledge and logic rather than specific trivia.

I caught the 'onetime' group first as they share the same meaning, no further associations needed, making them hard to miss. The same is true for the yellow words today. The blue theme was a bit harder, but not too tricky either as seeing 'dash' and 'hyphen' immediately made me search for marks used in writing. Although the group name says 'made with horizontal lines', I think it's helpful to just think of punctuation marks, even though the underscore and minus sign aren't technically part of punctuation.

Congratulations if you got today's Connections answer right, with or without the help of our handy hints above! And if you didn't succeed today, don't worry - a new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!