Answers and Clues for August 9
Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Welcome to weekend Connections where we don’t take any days off in order to keep our streaks alive. Not the hardest puzzle I’ve ever seen today, but some aspects will trip you up.
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.
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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.
- Inside
- Product
- Maze
- Syrup
- Fruit
- Knock-Knock
- Let Me In
- Muffin
- Practical
- Ghost
- Return
- Silk
- Casper
- Yield
- Twilight
- Dad
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Yellow Group – Give it time
- Green Group – Laugh it up
- Blue Group – Films with a ghastly twist
- Purple Group – Middle-America agriculture
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Yellow Group – Result
- Green Group – Kinds of Jokes
- Blue Group – Movies featuring supernatural romance
- Purple Group – Corn-y things
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:
- Yellow Group – Result (FRUIT, PRODUCT, RETURN, YIELD)
- Green Group – Kinds of Jokes (DAD, INSIDE, KNOCK-KNOCK, PRACTICAL)
- Blue Group – Movies featuring supernatural romance (CASPER, GHOST, LET ME IN, TWILIGHT)
- Purple Group – Corn-y things (MAZE, MUFFIN, SILK, SYRUP)
Well, this will end up playing into Blue Group later, but I did think that RETURN may have been part of the horror movie collection down there, as it definitely is one, but that was not the case, and it was part of the “end result” group up above instead. You can now see how it pretty easily connects with YIELD as a synonym.
The tricky parts begin here as you could view INSIDE, KNOCK-KNOCK and LET ME IN as the same group, but really it’s only two of them. I also thought PRACTICAL may be PRACTICAL Magic, again joining the supernatural group, but none of the others had cut-off words.
The Blue Group has those supernatural movies, ones featuring romance but I mean, if you picked those four just because they were supernatural movies more generally, that would also work. The one people may not get is Let Me In about a child vampire, which was eventually remade in English. Genre classic, check it out.
Purple Group may have been more doable this week. If you’re looking for the traditionally “_____ word” format, you could grab a few of these. Corn SILK didn’t exactly come to mind quickly for me, however.
How did you do today? I thought I made out okay, with a few exceptions of wrong guesses.
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