Lifehacker published the answers to NYT Connections #1,125 for Friday, July 10, 2026, and the board split cleanly into two everyday sets before turning trickier at the end. The yellow group was SMARTPHONE SETTINGS, while the green group was DESSERT MENU DESCRIPTORS.
That matters today because players opening the puzzle on July 10 were looking for the exact solution, not a broad hint. Tim Mulkerin said readers should expect clues, tips, strategies and then the full answer set, and he flagged the post as spoiler territory for anyone still working through the grid. He also lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has been writing in digital media and the tech world since 2016, a background that fits the fast, utility-first style of a daily puzzle explainer.
The yellow answers were AIRPLANE MODE, DO NOT DISTURB, HOTSPOT and LOCATION SERVICES. The green answers were DECADENT, FRESH-BAKED, MOLTEN and À LA MODE. In both groups, the pattern is built from phrases people already know rather than obscure wordplay, which is part of why the puzzle gives itself away only after the category name appears.
The harder part was what did not belong where it seemed to. All of the “mode” tiles had to be separated across different groups, so AIRPLANE MODE and DO NOT DISTURB could not be treated as a family. OUTKAST also looked like it might belong in a musician category, but it was a trap; the clue pointed to the first syllable instead. NEW ORDER was another music-related decoy because it is the name of an English band, but the real test was whether the tile fit the category logic in front of it, not the obvious association attached to the word.
That is the part that keeps Connections moving: the answer set is simple once it is solved, but the path there depends on reading the words as pieces of phrases, not just as labels. MOLTEN belongs in a construction like MOLTEN lava cake, and the purple-group puzzle rests on that same kind of hearing-first, sorting-second logic, even if the full umpire-vocab theme is still the one gap left hanging for anyone who wants the complete board in one glance.
For players, the takeaway is straightforward. Friday’s puzzle leaned on familiar phone settings and dessert language, then used music names and syllable tricks to misdirect the rest. The board is solved, but the best clue in it is still the same one that catches people every day: the word that looks obvious is often the one that belongs somewhere else.
