Sunk can describe being in serious trouble or unable to solve a problem, and it is one of the four words in the puzzle’s DOOMED group.
Sunk can mean experiencing serious trouble or being unable to solve a problem. Vocabulary.com also gives doomed and ruined as synonyms for the adjective. In other uses, sunk is the past tense and past participle of sink.
In the August 11, 2026 Connections board, August 11, 2026 Connections puzzle places SUNK with DONE, THROUGH, and TOAST under DOOMED.
How to use sunk
Use the adjective when the context presents a person, plan, or situation as being in serious trouble or unable to solve a problem. A sentence such as “Without another route, the team was sunk” illustrates that use. The word can also appear as a verb form: “The boat had sunk” uses the past participle of sink, rather than the trouble-related adjective.
The surrounding sentence supplies the intended reading. A problem can be described as sunk when its prospects are poor, while a physical object can be sunk when it has gone below a surface. These examples are illustrative usage, not extra rules for the puzzle. In a short phrase, “we are sunk” makes the adjective reading clear, whereas “the boat sunk” points toward the verb form. Reading the entire clause is therefore more useful than assigning one fixed meaning to the isolated spelling.
Natural examples
Here are illustrative examples of the trouble-related adjective:
- “If the last bus has left, we may be sunk.”
- “The missing document left the proposal sunk.”
- “They thought the project was sunk, but they kept looking for a solution.”
- “Without a way to repair the error, the plan looked sunk.”
For the verb form, compare: “The heavy object had sunk.” That sentence describes the result of sinking and does not by itself mean “doomed.” The examples show why a neighboring word can matter when a puzzle entry has multiple supported readings.
A common confusion
A useful distinction is between sank and sunk. The supplied research describes sank and sunk as two past-tense conjugations of the same verb and separately defines sunk costs as costs already incurred and unable to be recovered. In “The boat sank,” sank is the simple past. In “The boat had sunk,” sunk follows had as a past participle. In “We are sunk,” it is the adjective meaning that the situation is in serious trouble.
Sunk in Connections
The official puzzle uses SUNK in the category DOOMED, alongside DONE, THROUGH, and TOAST. Here the relevant referent is the adjective meaning that a person or situation is in serious trouble, not the physical verb sense. You can revisit August 11, 2026 solved Connections board to see the complete grouping.
Group logic
Once the category is suspected, test all four words together rather than treating SUNK alone as proof. DONE can mean finished, THROUGH can mean finished or done, and TOAST can be slang for doomed, ruined, or in trouble; the source assigns all four to DOOMED. The group therefore depends on the shared puzzle sense, while SUNK’s verb sense remains a separate reading. The August 11, 2026 Connections group explanation shows why the exact category matters.