Answers and Clues for August 23, 2025
Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Despite never hearing of two of these words at all, I managed to complete today’s Strands in relatively short order. The other clues helped me out, but if you need some assistance, check out below.
How to Play Connections
Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.
The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.
There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles. So, onto the hints and answers:
What Are Today’s Connections Hints?
These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers.
- SMARTWATCH
- BOWL
- OIL
- CHICANERY
- COOLANT
- PODCAST
- HIPPODROME
- VAPE
- LEGERDEMAIN
- CRYPTO
- DECEIT
- FUEL
- COLISEUM
- SUBTERFUGE
- BRAKE FLUID
- STADIUM
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- BLUE GROUP – Up to no good
- YELLOW GROUP – Running on empty
- GREEN GROUP – Cheer them on
- PURPLE GROUP – The 21st Century
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- BLUE GROUP – Skulduggery
- YELLOW GROUP – Liquids You Put Into Cars
- GREEN GROUP – Arenas
- PURPLE GROUP – Modern Inventions
What Are Today’s Connections Answers?
The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:
- BLUE GROUP – Skulduggery (CHICANERY, DECEIT, LEGERDEMAIN, SUBTERFUGE)
- YELLOW GROUP – Liquids You Put Into Cars (BRAKE FLUID, COOLANT, FUEL, OIL)
- GREEN GROUP – Arenas (BOWL, COLISEUM, HIPPODROM, STADIUM)
- PURPLE GROUP – Modern Inventions (CRYPTO, PODCAST, SMARTWATCH, VAPE)
Starting with Blue Group, this contains one of the words I’d never heard at all. Not chicanery, as I was at least familiar with that, but legerdemain, which means: “skillful use of one’s hands when performing conjuring tricks.” Who knew?
Yellow Group was just super easy. I mean, I didn’t really even clock that they were all liquids, just that they were clearly all related to cars. You’d really have to know nothing about cars at all to miss this one.
Green Group did trip me up with one word I also don’t know, hippodrome, which is “a venue for equestrian (horse and chariot) races and public spectacles, originating in ancient Greece and Rome.” I mean, I thought all that was a coliseum, which is another word in the list, of course.
Purple Group was just the leftovers for me. I’m not sure I would call things like a podcast and “invention,” but I suppose I get what they mean. I would argue that at least half of these, or more, have made everything worse.
How many of these did you get on your own?
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