NYT Connections today hints and answers — Saturday, November 9 (#517)
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Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 9 for puzzle #517 are easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #516, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #517. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
As reminder, the Tech Guild of the New York Times is on strike and have requested that people not play games on the NYT games app or online. They have created a strike edition website which has the same puzzles if you would prefer not to cross the picket line.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
?? Yellow: Contorted
?? Green: Smallest amount
?? Blue: Algebra terms
?? Purple: Words before "room" to mean lavatory
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Here's a larger hint: Brush up on your algebra but get twisted while looking for a tiny bit and don't for get to hit the water closet.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #517?
Drumroll, please...
?? Contorted: Bent, gnarly, twisted, warped
?? Smallest amount: Lick, ounce, shred, trace
?? Algebra terms: Exponent, power, radical, root
?? Words before "room" to mean lavatory: Bath, powder, rest, throne
I was almost caught in the trap of slang with shred, gnarly, twisted and radical. I'm not sure why I didn't take the bait though.
Instead, I started today's puzzle when I lick and trace which led back to shred and then ounce for tiny amounts.
Bath and throne were close to each other and I immediately added room to the end. It was quick work to find powder (room) and rest(room). All colloquialisms for the bathroom.
Gnarly and twisted got their time in the sun here by snagging bent and warped for the yellow category.
Thus, Algebra got the rote fill in with exponent, radical, power and root. Math is not a personal strong suit and I'm not sure I would have remembered that all those words are specific to algebra. So, I happy to have it last.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #516, which had a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Today, I started the puzzle off with the green group when I immediately saw dill and kosher. Sour was quick to follow and I debated spicy but put sweet instead which got us to pickles.
Sticking with spicy, I had suggestive and adult before finding blue to get the blue category.
I saw the yellow category but wanted to knock out purple first so we picked cheese, cord, deck and mustard for "Cut the..." Cute. Was not familiar with the phrase "cut the mustard" which refers to being good enough or not ala "I didn't cut the mustard at tryouts." Probably won't add that one to my lexicon.
The yellow category was a nice and simple antic, caper, exploit and stunt for escapades.
By the bye, I discovered through some trial and error yesterday while playing with the archives that the strike version connections does not have a four errors and you're out policy like the normal NYTimes one. You can go as long as you want apparently and it will just tally up the how many incorrect guesses you took. Takes away some of tension if you hit too many strikes but does make for a relaxing game to mull over.