Today's real head-scratcher in Connections isn't the purple airport code puzzle — it's the seemingly ordinary yellow group of filler words. ACTUALLY, LIKE, SO, WELL are four words that barely register in everyday conversation, but once they're dropped into a 16-word grid, players tend to slot them into other categories first, missing this most obvious group entirely.
The 16 words for #1148 (August 2) are: LIKE, AIRPLANE, VIA, FLAX, À LA, SO, BY, DARK, PER, LORD, WELL, ASEA, THROUGH, BEAST, OLGA, ACTUALLY.
The green group is a set of prepositions meaning "by means of": BY, PER, THROUGH, VIA — all four can precede an action to indicate method, making this the most straightforward and logically tidy group of the four.
The blue group plays on a fill-in-the-blank phrase game, with the answer being AIRPLANE, BEAST, DARK, À LA. All four words can be followed by "MODE" — airplane mode, beast mode, dark mode, à la mode — spanning everything from phone settings to how you eat dessert. The range seems unrelated, but they all follow the same rule.
The purple group is today's true puzzle centerpiece: ASEA, FLAX, LORD, OLGA. The logic here isn't about meaning — it's about form. Add one letter in front of a US airport code, and you get one of these four seemingly nonsensical words. In other words, the purple group isn't testing your English vocabulary — it's testing your eye for letter manipulation.
The yellow group consists of filler words: ACTUALLY, LIKE, SO, WELL — words used to pad out sentences in speech, carrying no real meaning, yet frequently misjudged by players as having thematic connections and sorted into the wrong group.
Today's answers are these four groups: Yellow — ACTUALLY, LIKE, SO, WELL; Green — BY, PER, THROUGH, VIA; Blue — AIRPLANE, BEAST, DARK, À LA; Purple — ASEA, FLAX, LORD, OLGA.
