NYT Connections — August 20, 2026
Hints — one at a time
Hint 1 of 5
Today's board moves from styles of pizza on a menu, to types of identifying numbers assigned to people or things, to small punctuation marks that all curve the same basic way, and finally to words hiding an animal from the Chinese zodiac at the start.
Hint 2 of 5
Yellow (easiest): each word or phrase names a style of pizza you could order.
Hint 3 of 5
Green: these all describe a category of number used to identify something specific — a person, a device, or an element.
Hint 4 of 5
Blue: squint at each of these small marks and they all share a similar curved or hooked shape, even though they're used in very different languages.
Hint 5 of 5
Purple (hardest): read just the first few letters of each word and you'll find an animal from the Chinese zodiac hiding at the start.
The answer — spoilers!
Reveal the full answer
Kinds Of Pizza
DIAVOLA · HAWAIIAN · MEAT LOVERS · WHITE
Kinds Of Numbers
ATOMIC · SERIAL · SOCIAL SECURITY · TELEPHONE
Similarly Shaped Typographical Marks
APOSTROPHE · CEDILLA · COMMA · OKINA
Starting With Chinese Zodiac Animals
DRAGONFLY · OXFORD · PIGMENT · RATCHET
This puzzle by the numbers
- Starting With Chinese Zodiac Animals
- SOCIAL SECURITY
Counted from our own archive of NYT Connections answers — not published anywhere else.
