Today's puzzle alerts you to blinking forums.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for September 12 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,189. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,188, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
What is Connections
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.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Today's Connection Grid and Words
- Turn Signal
- Weather
- Poster
- Bumper Sticker
- Vanity Plate
- Cursor
- Spoiler
- Troll
- Smoke Detector
- Fuzzy Dice
- Spammer
- Nerd
- Red
- Eyelids
- hood Ornament
- Lurker
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Personal touch
- 🟩 Green: Too online
- 🟦 Blue: Beep, beep
- 🟪 Purple: Warning
Today's Connections Group Hints
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Ways to personalize a car
- 🟩 Green: People in an online forum
- 🟦 Blue: Things that blink
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Alert
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.
Today's Connections answers
The Connections answers on September 12 for puzzle #1,189 are slightly easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.5 out of 5.
- 🟨 Ways to personalize a car: Bumper sticker, fuzzy dice, hood ornament, vanity plate
- 🟩 People in an online forum: Lurker, poster, spammer, troll
- 🟦 Things that blink: Cursor, eyelids, smoke detector, turn signal
- 🟪 ____ Alert: Nerd, red, spoiler, weather
My way into today's puzzle was red alert, which put me on to spoiler alert and weather alert. It took a moment to find nerd alert, but we got there.
The forum users were pretty obvious to me from there: troll, spammer, lurker and poster.
I spotted the car personalization, so I entered cursor, eyelids, smoke detector, and turn signal next to get the blinky things.
This left bumper sticker, fuzzy dice, hood ornament, and vanity plate.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Chemical elements: Actinium, krypton, lead, sulfur
- 🟩 What you might see sticking out of a window: Air conditioner, catio, clothesline, flower box
- 🟦 Bruce Springsteen classics: Atlantic city, badlands, born to run, thunder road
- 🟪 Ending in synonyms for "happening now":
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,1878 which had a difficulty rating of 1.8 out of 5.
I spotted the green and yellow set almost immediately between the event jobs (I was thinking weddings) and internalizing words. So my trick was figuring out which of the final eight was blue or purple.
Following the internalize words, the self-care ones became clear, which left agenda, envelope, limits and luck as the only ones that I thought could be the purple set.
Then I entered in exercise, journal, meditate and unplug for the blue set.
The guess was which were yellow and green. As a reminder, yellow sets tend to be nouns while green ones tend to be verbs or adjectives.
So, green is absorb, digest, process and take in.
Then yellow is band, florist, photographer and planner.
