Connections #1226: October 19, 2026

Connections #1226 sorts 16 words into four groups, and the colors tell you how the setter ranked them. Yellow is seethe: BOIL, FUME, RAVE, STEAM. Green is all talk: BLATHER, GAS, HOT AIR, WIND. Blue is "mc" things at mcdonald's: FLURRY, MUFFIN, NUGGETS, RIB. Purple is ending in birds: ALIBIS, BALLOON, ESCROW, MOHAWK.

Read the endings: ALIBIS → IBIS; BALLOON → LOON; ESCROW → CROW; MOHAWK → HAWK. Each extracted word names a bird.

GAS and WIND can suggest physical substances, but here they join BLATHER and HOT AIR as talk with little substance. STEAM instead joins BOIL, FUME and RAVE in the anger group. The bird endings give a spelling-based check for the purple group: look at the complete ending of each card, not its everyday meaning.