Kickstart a week of NYT Connections with a guaranteed win: all you have to do is sneak a cheeky peek at today's answers and then bask in your speedy victory. If you prefer to keep things honest but can't quite find the link between words, take a look at the hints for the September 18 (#99) game and give yourself a helping hand.
Today's Connections really surprised me. I didn't expect myself to see the link between one of the groups today, but I found myself putting them together quite quickly and without too much fuss. That's not a bad way to start the week at all—here's hoping I can keep it up.
NYT Connections hint today: Monday, September 18
Let's help you make sense of today's tangle of Connections.
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Yellow: Someone either book-smart or fiercely perceptive might be called these.
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Green: This group's a collection of US airlines—best of luck, the rest of the world.
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Blue: Dusty old Westerns filled with shootouts and horses will probably contain these tropes.
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Purple: Every word in this group is a surname used in the title of a TV show.
Don't scroll any further until you're ready for the full answers!
NYT Connections answer today: Monday, September 18 (#99)
Need a complete set of answers in a hurry? Here you go.
- 🟨 Yellow: Bright, Clever, Quick, Sharp (Intelligent)
- 🟩 Green: Alaska, Frontier, Southwest, Spirit (Airlines)
- 🟦 Blue: Cowboy, Drifter, Outlaw, Sheriff (Western tropes)
- 🟪 Purple: Lasso, Mars, Rogers, Smart (TV show title surnames)
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!
