Today’s New York Times Connections puzzle (No. 910 for December 7, 2025) leans into speed, offal, joinery, and a bit of Spanish. If you’re trying to preserve a streak, it helps to know which words actually belong together before you burn through your mistakes.
Today’s Connections #910 full word list
These are the 16 words in today’s grid:
| Row 1 | Row 2 | Row 3 | Row 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barrel | Bolt | Hurtle | Tear |
| Gizzard | Heart | Tongue | Tripe |
| Dado | Dovetail | Mitre | Mortise |
| Capitan | Dorado | Greco | Paso |
Color order and category hints
As usual, the puzzle grades each group by difficulty:
- Yellow – easiest
- Green – easy–medium
- Blue – medium–hard
- Purple – trickiest, often relying on theme or wordplay
Here are lightweight hints for each without giving away the exact sets:
- Yellow category: All about moving very quickly.
- Green category: Specific cuts of meat, not the usual steaks.
- Blue category: Terms you hear in a woodshop when pieces meet.
- Purple category: Each word commonly follows the Spanish masculine article “El”.
If that’s enough to get you over the line, stop here and regroup the grid. The full solutions sit just below.
Today’s Connections #910 answers
Yellow group – Move At Breakneck Speed
- Barrel
- Bolt
- Hurtle
- Tear
Each of these can describe moving extremely fast: you can barrel down a hill, bolt from a room, hurtle along a road, or tear across a field. They all land in that “barely controlled speed” space, which makes them easy to confuse with more physical categories if you’re thinking of objects instead of actions.
Green group – Organ Meats
- Gizzard
- Heart
- Tongue
- Tripe
This set focuses on offal: edible internal organs and associated parts. Gizzard appears on poultry and some regional menus, heart and tongue both show up in a lot of traditional cuisines, and tripe is stomach lining. The shared theme is anatomy rather than preparation style or species.
Blue group – Woodworking Joint Terms
- Dado
- Dovetail
- Mitre
- Mortise
Every word here names a way to join pieces of wood:
- Dado – a three-sided groove cut across the grain to accept a shelf or panel.
- Dovetail – interlocking pins and tails that resist pulling apart, classic in drawer construction.
- Mitre – two pieces meeting at an angled cut, often 45 degrees, for frames and trim.
- Mortise – the slot that receives a tenon in a mortise-and-tenon joint.
It’s easy to get distracted by “Mitre” and think of hats or angles in abstract, but the rest of the group pulls it firmly into carpentry.
Purple group – El _____
- Capitan
- Dorado
- Greco
- Paso
The purple category hangs on Spanish titles and names that commonly appear with “El” in front:
- El Capitan – the granite monolith in Yosemite National Park, also used for ships and other references.
- El Dorado – the legendary city of gold and a recurring place name.
- El Greco – the nickname of the painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos.
- El Paso – the city in Texas.
This is the most thematic set of the day; none of the four are obviously related unless you recognize them as proper nouns that share the same Spanish article.
How to approach a mixed-theme Connections wall like #910
Today’s puzzle combines straightforward synonym and category work (speed words, organ meats) with more niche vocabulary (joinery) and cultural references (Spanish proper names). A systematic pass helps reduce guesswork:
Step 1: Start with the loudest semantic cluster. Here, Gizzard, Heart, Tongue, and Tripe are all body parts and foods, which makes the green set one of the safest early solves.
Step 2: Look for specialized jargon. Dado, Dovetail, Mitre, and Mortise all sound like they come out of a workshop, which cues “woodworking” or “joinery” as a likely theme.
Step 3: Separate verbs from nouns. For yellow, focusing on how each word behaves in a sentence (“to barrel,” “to bolt,” etc.) surfaces the shared sense of motion instead of, say, the fastener meaning of Bolt or the container meaning of Barrel.
Step 4: Save “proper noun energy” for last. Once you’ve cleared the clearer categories, what remains often points to trivia, titles, or phrases. Here, that leaves Capitan, Dorado, Greco, and Paso, which click together once you mentally prefix “El”.
Working in that order—obvious category, technical terms, flexible verbs, then names—keeps the hardest set from contaminating your early guesses and helps protect your four lives.
Puzzle #910 is a good snapshot of what Connections likes to do when it’s not being outright cruel: two categories you can spot in seconds, one that rewards niche knowledge, and one that hinges on recognizing a shared phrase. If you made it through with a streak intact, you had to shift gears between all four.
