Key Points
Purple group features tools with last two letters removed.
Yellow group covers fitness class types including aerobics and Pilates.
Green group addresses demeanor words like attitude and bearing.
Blue group highlights peace activists including Gandhi and Mandela.
The New York Times Connections puzzle for June 18 includes “hamm” as one of four answers in its purple group category. The puzzle features four distinct themes: fitness class types in yellow, demeanor words in green, peace activists in blue, and tools with their last two letters removed in purple. Players found the purple group particularly challenging.
Purple Group: Tools Minus Last Two Letters
The purple group theme removes the final two letters from tool names. The four answers are hamm (hammer), jigs (jigsaw), plie (pliers), and saw (sawhorse). This wordplay category proved to be the toughest of the four groups in today’s puzzle.
Other Puzzle Categories
The yellow group focuses on fitness class types: aerobics, barre, bootcamp, and Pilates. The green group covers demeanor with attitude, bearing, carriage, and presence. The blue group highlights peace activists: Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Tutu. Each category required different knowledge areas to solve.
How the Puzzle Works
The Times offers a Connections Bot where registered players can receive numeric scores and analysis of their answers. Players can track their progress, including puzzles completed, win rate, perfect scores, and win streaks. The game remains one of the most popular word puzzles from the New York Times Games section.
Final Thoughts
The June 18 Connections puzzle demonstrates how wordplay and lateral thinking challenge players across multiple difficulty levels. The purple group’s tool-based category proved most difficult for solvers.
FAQs
Hamm is ‘hammer’ with the last two letters removed. It belongs to the purple group theme of tools minus their final two letters.
The purple group was toughest, requiring solvers to recognize tool names and remove their last two letters to find answers.
Each category contains exactly four answers. Today’s puzzle featured yellow, green, blue, and purple groups with four words each.
Disclaimer:
The content shared by Meyka AI PTY LTD is solely for research and informational purposes. Meyka is not a financial advisory service, and the information provided should not be considered investment or trading advice.
About Author

Huzaifa Zahoor
Co FounderHuzaifa Zahoor is the engineer who built Meyka. He has spent years writing Python, training AI models, and building data pipelines specifically for financial markets. His technical articles have reached over 30,000 readers on Medium, so he knows how to make complex things easy to follow. If this article touches on how the tools work, he is the person who actually built them.
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