NYT Connections puzzle #899 for November 26, 2025 leans on short words, acronyms, and a clever visual trick with backwards spellings. If the grid is giving you trouble, it helps to know what kinds of patterns you’re hunting for before you lock in guesses.
The 16 words in play are:
| Word | Word | Word | Word |
|---|---|---|---|
| JAN | SEC | IRA | MAR |
| APR | KAT | GOD | MAY |
| FLOW | DEB | CAN | TAB |
| COULD | CFO | SUE | MIGHT |
Quick overview of today’s four categories
Connections always breaks down into four sets of four. For #899, the categories are:
| Color | Category | Words in the group |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow (easiest) | Verbs expressing possibility | CAN, COULD, MAY, MIGHT |
| Green | Women’s nicknames | DEB, JAN, KAT, SUE |
| Blue | Financial abbreviations | APR, CFO, IRA, SEC |
| Purple (hardest) | Backwards animals | FLOW, GOD, MAR, TAB |
If you want to reconstruct the solve without looking at how each set works, you can stop here and build the groups directly from the table.
Yellow group – verbs expressing possibility
The yellow set is all about modal verbs that describe something that can happen but isn’t guaranteed. The four words are:
- CAN
- COULD
- MAY
- MIGHT
All four are used to talk about possibility:
- “It can rain later.”
- “We could leave early.”
- “You may need a jacket.”
- “They might join us.”
The trap here is that MAY and the three-letter month abbreviations (JAN, MAR, APR) almost beg to be grouped together. The puzzle leans on that as a red herring; only MAY belongs with the modal verbs.
Green group – women’s nicknames
The green category is a run of short forms of common women’s names. These are:
- DEB – from Deborah or Debra
- JAN – from Janet, Janice, or Janine
- KAT – from Katherine, Kathleen, or similar
- SUE – from Susan or Suzanne
They all function as familiar nicknames you might use in speech or text. Again, JAN looks like a month, but here it sits with names rather than dates.
Blue group – financial abbreviations
The blue group is where the acronyms and shorthand come together. Each entry is a well-known term from banking, investing, or corporate finance:
- APR – annual percentage rate, the cost of borrowing expressed yearly
- CFO – chief financial officer, the senior executive in charge of a company’s finances
- IRA – individual retirement account in the US tax system
- SEC – Securities and Exchange Commission, the main US securities regulator
The extra layer of misdirection here is that SEC is also a common abbreviation for “second,” and APR can read as a month abbreviation in the same way as JAN and MAR. If you were chasing a “time” or “months” set, these are the pieces that make it feel almost correct but not quite.
Purple group – words that hide animals backwards
The toughest set today hides animals in plain sight by reversing them. Read each purple word backwards and an animal appears:
- FLOW → WOLF
- GOD → DOG
- MAR → RAM
- TAB → BAT
None of these look connected at first glance. The unlock is to notice that they are all short, simple letter sets that turn into something much more obvious when flipped.
Tip: for this kind of theme, quickly scanning each leftover word in reverse is often enough to reveal the pattern once the cleaner categories are out of the way.
How to safely build the solution without burning mistakes
If you’re trying to preserve a streak, it helps to remove riskier guesses and clear out the straightforward sets first. With #899, a low-mistake path looks like this:
- Isolate the modals. Grab CAN, COULD, MAY, MIGHT as “verbs expressing possibility.” None of the other words function as modal verbs, so this is a safe early guess.
- Separate names from months. Once CAN and MAY are gone, the remaining three-letter words that feel like people—DEB, JAN, KAT, SUE—can be grouped as “women’s nicknames.” That leaves the time-related red herrings (APR, MAR, SEC, JAN) broken apart.
- Collect the finance acronyms. From what’s left, APR, CFO, IRA, SEC all clearly belong to a financial context. Group them as “financial abbreviations.”
- Reverse what’s left. The final four, FLOW, GOD, MAR, TAB, now stand alone. Reading each backwards reveals WOLF, DOG, RAM, and BAT, confirming “backwards animals” as the purple set.
This order keeps the trickiest insight (reading words backwards) for last, when there are fewer options to sift through and fewer ways to make a wrong combination.
Once you see through the month and time bait and notice the backwards spellings, Connections #899 turns from slippery to tidy. The verbs, nicknames, finance jargon, and hidden animals all sit in clean, non-overlapping lanes—exactly the kind of structure that makes a satisfying end screen once everything clicks into place.
