We Need to Talk About Wednesday’s Doggone Connections Puzzle

Long ago, the New York Times Connections puzzle replaced Wordle as my favorite online puzzle. But the Connections puzzle for Wednesday is a real dog fight to solve. Spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t played Connections yet, do that now.

In Connections, you sort 16 words into four related categories. And in Wednesday’s puzzle, fully half of the words can precede the word “dog.”

Here come those spoilers.

Corn dog. Hunting dog. Sheep dog. Rescue dog. Salty dog, Prairie dog. Top dog. And even though this one is a bit of a stretch, “sausage dog.”

Also, the unsorted grid begins with the words BOW and WOW, which fall into different categories.

Good luck sorting those eight dog words into the two groups that the Times puzzle editors intended! Here’s the answer grid filled out properly.

So the puzzle-makers first divided the “dog” words into a category relating to real, four-legged canines: hunting, rescue, sheep and that questionable “sausage,” which I guess means dachshund.

And then the remaining four dog words went into the purple category, where they fit alongside other words that aren’t real canines at all, including one food (corn dog), one animal (prairie dog), and two slangy expressions (salty dog and top dog).

Players who complained about the puzzle on Reddit made some good points.

“I was like, “there’s 7 answers???” one player wrote, punctuating their response so aggressively that I could almost hear them groaning. “Well, wait, some of these are like dog dogs and the others are like, well, they aren’t…”

“After I lost today, my next Google search was ‘TF is a sausage dog,’” wrote another player.

I’m not unfamiliar with the dachshund breed. At one point, my brother owned five of these little wiggly pups. But if I called them anything other than “dachshunds,” it was “wiener dog,” not “sausage dog.”

Some Reddit users point out that “sausage dog” is a term used in Australia and the UK. (Viewers of Australian animated dog show Bluey, a true TV treasure, might have known it from there.) Some players likely threw the word sausage into one of the dog groups out of desperation, too. (Dogs…eat sausage?)

And a few Reddit commenters pointed out that this puzzle is training players to “presolve,” meaning you can’t just pick a group of four similar words and hope you’re right, but need to sort all 16 words out on paper or elsewhere before trying to solve.

Regardless, I’m guessing more than a few Connections streaks got chewed up today.

Thanks “fur” nothing, New York Times puzzle people.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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