NYT Connections Today — Hints and Answers for Thursday, September 5 (Contest #452)
Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers into different categories. It can be tricky, so read on if you need some clues.
What do you do when you’re done? Well, play some word games of course. I also have daily Wordle hints and answers , Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help with those too.
SPOILER ALERT: Below is information about today’s NYT Connections. So don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
NYT Connections Today (Contest #452) – Today’s Words
The words of today’s NYT Connections are…
- BASS
- BAG
- COLOUR
- BAG
- RECEPTION
- BLOWOUT
- COUNTRY
- PAN
- SNOW
- EXPLOSION
- GARDEN
- SCORE
- SLAM SHUT
- SMALL
- CROPPING
- ATTEMPT
NYT Connections Today (Contest #452) – Hint #1 – Group Hints
What are some clues to the current NYT Connections groups?
- Yellow: Things done to her
- Vegetables: Verbal disapproval
- Blue: Acquire
- Purple: Gridiron Data
Do you need more pointers?
We’re really getting into spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today’s NYT Connections puzzles…
NYT Connections Today (Game #452) – Hint #2 – Group Answers
What are the answers for the current NYT Connections groups?
- YELLOW: HAIR SALON OFFERS
- GREEN: CRITICISM
- BLUE: OBTAIN
- PURPLE: MEASURED IN FOOTBALL STATISTICS
Okay, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Connections Today (Contest #452) – The Answers
The answers to today’s Connections game, #452, are…
- YELLOW: HAIR SALON OFFERS BLOW OUT, COLOR, CUT, TRIM
- GREEN: CRITICISM BASH, BLAST, PAN, SLAM
- BLUE: OBTAIN BAG, LAND, SCORE, SNAG
- PURPLE: MEASURED IN FOOTBALL STATISTICS ATTEMPT, RECEPTION, BAG, GARDEN
- My rating: Moderate
- My score: Failure
Do you know how you get the five stages of grief? I’m going through something similar with Connections. First, pleasure to find a new game to play every day, then satisfaction while I was struggling with it, mostly winning, sometimes losing. That was followed by bewilderment when i started losing regularly, self-hatred when I decided I was just too stupid to win every day. And now? Now I’ve achieved boredom: it’s just not fun to play every day.
Connections seems to have almost no balance. Some days are impossibly hard, others are incredibly easy. Within a game, a “blue” group – supposedly the second hardest – can be much easier to solve than an “easy” yellow one. There are words that sometimes you wouldn’t expect anyone to know – or to know that they can be used in any particular context, anyway. And there’s a huge geographic bias that puts anyone outside the US at a huge disadvantage. And that last factor in particular costs me a guess or two almost every day.
It’s simply not nearly as much fun as Wordle or even Strands. Playing it is randomly stressful and frequently unsatisfying.
Today there is a group about football (yawn; I think we have baseball tomorrow, right?) and one about hair salons with the word BLOWOUT, a term I have never heard in that context. I solved one group (the blue “obtain” group), but couldn’t make anything out of the remaining 12 words so I gave up and guessed randomly until I lost.
Maybe I should have solved one of the others; maybe I should have read more carefully, or spent more time on it. But at least today I didn’t look at the answers and think, “Oh, idiot Marc, you should have solved that.” Instead, I shrugged and went on with my day—which is probably not the attitude the NYT is looking for here.
How was your day? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Answers to NYT Connections (Wednesday, September 4, Contest #451)
- YELLOW: VERY SMALL AMOUNT TIP, SHRED, TOUCH, FOLLOW
- GREEN: PURCHASING PUPPIES BED, BOWL, COLLAR, CRATE
- BLUE: HELP ORGANIZE A PARTY CARE, HOSTESSES, PLAN, THROW
- PURPLE: SYMBOLS ON A KEYBOARD HOOK, CARET, HASH, STAR
What is NYT Connections?
NYT Connections is one of the increasingly popular word games from the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that have something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a bit harder, blue is often quite difficult, and purple is usually very difficult.
On the plus side, you don’t technically have to solve the last question, because you can answer it by elimination. Plus, you can make a maximum of four mistakes, which gives you some breathing room.
It is a bit more complicated than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For example, watch out for homophones and other wordplay that can obscure the answers.
It is free to play via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
