NYT Connections answers today Feb 7: Puzzle #972 categories and solutions

Saturday’s Connections puzzle (Game #972) leaned into symbols and “looks-like” logic, mixing straightforward sets with a final group that depended on noticing typography rather than meaning. If you hit a wall late, you weren’t alone: the grid encouraged several believable wrong groupings before the correct themes clicked.

Below are the full solutions for February 7, 2026 (ET), along with a quick read on why each group works and where many solvers tended to get diverted.

Connections answer today Feb 7: the four groups

Why the yellow group felt “too easy”

The yellow set is a visual/physical reference: the number of pips you see on standard dice faces. The trick is that the words aren’t about counting in order; they’re about the familiar arrangements you can picture. This is also why ONE and SIX don’t appear—once you see that absence, the group often becomes obvious.

A common stumble here was treating the words as a simple sequence or as “small numbers,” which can feel plausible until you notice the puzzle’s stronger visual cue.

The green group: the math-symbol trap

DIVIDED BY, EQUALS, MINUS, and PLUS are written phrases for operators and signs used in basic arithmetic. The category is clean, but the grid’s misdirection comes from the fact that some items can function as verbs or concepts in everyday language, inviting overthinking.

If you tried to form a group around “operations” in a broader sense, you may have pulled in unrelated words mentally and delayed the straightforward match sitting in front of you.

The blue group and the punctuation debate

COLON, ELLIPSIS, PERIOD, and QUOTATION MARK are all punctuation marks, but this set can still be slippery because punctuation has multiple naming conventions. For example, “period” and “full stop” overlap, and “quotation mark” can be singular or plural in everyday speech. The puzzle kept it accessible by choosing widely recognized names, while still rewarding anyone who scanned for “writing-system” terms early.

If you were hunting for grammar parts of speech instead, you likely wasted a guess—this group is about symbols on the page, not how words function in a sentence.

Purple: why typography mattered more than vocabulary

The purple group is the one that tends to trigger the “oh, come on” reaction: I, L, T, and X as lowercase letters. On many fonts and screens, these characters can look deceptively similar across cases—or even resemble other symbols—so the set is less about language and more about visual identification.

This is also why the group can feel unfair if your mental image of “lowercase x” isn’t immediately top-of-mind. The puzzle is effectively asking you to step outside meaning and focus on form.

What this puzzle suggests about upcoming grids

Connections often cycles between “pure meaning” days and “shape/format” days. Puzzle #972 leaned heavily toward the latter with two visually anchored categories (dice pips and letterforms) alongside two conventional symbol sets (math and punctuation). If that pattern holds, solvers may want to watch for more typographic or formatting-based categories in the next few days—things like abbreviations, keyboard symbols, or homographs that change meaning based on capitalization.

The best practical adjustment is simple: when you have a few leftovers that seem unrelated, consider whether the link is how they look, how they’re written, or how they appear on a keyboard—not what they mean.

Sources consulted: The New York Times; Forbes; TechRadar; Parade