Connections #869 brings a neat wink on the default top row: “ONLY CONNECT OLIVE BRANCH.” Beyond the wordplay, today’s set skews approachable—testers rated it 2.3/5—though the purple group can still trip you up if you don’t spot the shared tail word.

Today’s 16-word grid

ONLY CONNECT OLIVE BRANCH
FAB FAN JUST TWIST
FANTASTIC SIMPLY CHERRY SPREAD
RADIATE MINT PETIT MERELY

Category hints (no spoilers)

  • Yellow: flow outward
  • Green: barely there
  • Blue: fancy additions to a drink
  • Purple: add a single-digit number to the end

One tile reveal per group

  • Yellow: RADIATE
  • Green: ONLY
  • Blue: MINT
  • Purple: FAB

Connections #869 — today’s answers

Group Category Answers (4)
Yellow Emanate BRANCH, FAN, RADIATE, SPREAD
Green In the slightest JUST, MERELY, ONLY, SIMPLY
Blue Cocktail garnishes CHERRY, MINT, OLIVE, TWIST
Purple _____ FOUR CONNECT, FAB, FANTASTIC, PETIT

Why these groupings work

Yellow threads verbs for “send out” or “expand”: branch (out), fan (out), radiate, spread. Green collects adverbs that minimize: just, merely, only, simply. Blue sits squarely behind the bar with common garnishes: cherry, mint, olive, twist. Purple hinges on a shared final word—Four—as in Connect Four, Fab Four, Fantastic Four, and petit four.

Tip: “FAN” and “SPREAD” can read as nouns, but here they act as “fan out” and “spread” to align with the emanate group. Spotting part-of-speech shifts helps separate near-misses from the intended set.

New puzzles go live daily at midnight local time. If you like an extra challenge, try solving bottom-up by hunting the purple pattern first.