Some days the Connections just don’t seem to add up—not before you’ve run out of guesses, anyway. This is where we swoop in to help. You’ll find all the answers for today’s NYT Connections game waiting below, as well as a full range of hints for the September 15 (#96) puzzle if you’d just like a quick hint.
The tricky ones are almost always painfully obvious in hindsight, aren’t they? I really struggled with today’s purple-coloured Connections, so much so I ended up working around them until I had nothing else left to pick. And now I’ve stared at them all in a neat row, I’m wondering how I ever thought they didn’t go together.
NYT Connections hint today: Friday, September 15
Give yourself a helping hand with our hints for today’s game.
Yellow: Everything in this category is the sort of animal you might find on a farm. A dairy farm, specifically, although some of these are more common than others.
Green: Cast a light on the answers with this clue. Whether it’s a torch, candle, or plain old lightbulb, they all might all be described with one of these words when they’re in use.
Blue: Every one of these words is a piece of equipment as well as an Olympics discipline, although this apparatus isn’t used by sprinters or swimmers, but gymnasts.
Purple: Some words could use half or even less as many letters as they do to spell out. Take “queue”, for example—or “Q”, as it could be. There are quite a lot of words like that.
Don’t scroll any further until you’re ready for the full answers!
NYT Connections answer today: Friday, September 15 (#96)
Yellow: Buffalo, Cow, Goat, Sheep (Bovids)
Green: Beam, Glow, Radiate, Shine (Emit light)
Blue: Floor, Horse, Rings, Vault (Gymnastics apparatus)
Purple: Cutie, Envy, Excel, Seedy (Words that sound like two letters)
More about the New York Times’ Connections puzzle game
Connections is the NYT’s latest popular puzzle game where you have to find the common thread that ties four seemingly unrelated words together. Can you find all four increasingly challenging groups of words before you make four mistakes? Don’t forget: every day only has one solution even if some words look like they could belong to more than one group, and you can (and should) shuffle the grid as many times as you need to. It can help jog your brain into reading the words in a different way.
If you enjoy Connections, you should check out the board game Codenames. It’s a popular party game that tasks players with using clues to guess certain words from a grid. As in Connections, the heart of the game lies in how many different possible interpretations the words could have. Connections also clearly owes a debt to Wordle, the hit puzzle game that the New York Times bought in 2022. Perhaps most obvious is the way it uses colored emojis to let you share the results of your puzzle with other players on social media:
Connections
Puzzle #80
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Each color corresponds to one grouping of four words; a row with mixed colors shows you incorrectly guessed one or more words in a group that didn’t totally match. The rows also show what order you solved the Connections puzzle in. The rows aren’t all created equal: the New York Times ranks them from “straightforward” to “tricky” starting with yellow and progressing to purple.
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Want to show up your Connections friends or just challenge yourself? Try to start by identifying the purple words first and nailing them with your very first guess!