Today's puzzle gets into the Halloween spirit with an age-old question, work-out routine, and dog competition.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for October 27 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,234. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,233, 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
- Taco
- Pepper
- Drum
- Jar
- Tinker
- Tower
- Fiddle
- Jingle
- Liberty
- Canal
- Trifle
- Diving
- Anvil
- Bottoms
- Stirrup
- Meddle
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Play with
- 🟩 Green: Listen
- 🟦 Blue: Bibberty
- 🟪 Purple: Plath
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: Mess (with)
- 🟩 Green: Parts of the ear
- 🟦 Blue: ____ Bell
- 🟪 Purple: Bell ____
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 October 27 for puzzle #1,234 are a bit easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Mess (with): Fiddle, meddle, tinker, trifle
- 🟩 Parts of the ear: Anvil, canal, drum, stirrup
- 🟦 ____ Bell: Diving, jingle, liberty, taco
- 🟪 Bell ____: Bottoms, jar, pepper, tower
I managed a reverse rainbow, but it took a few strikes to get there.
Initially, I grabbed jingle bell, diving bell, liberty bell, and tinker bell. Strike one.
My reset was seeing jar and thinking bell jar. So, I gave bell bottoms, bell pepper, and bell tower together to get the blue set.
My second strike came when I swapped out jingle bell (the logic was jingle bells, not the singular version) for Taco Bell. I finally looked around and was able to see the yellow set, which helped me finally ring the blue bells by dropping tinker.
So, I put in the ear words next: anvil, canal, drum, and stirrup.
Which leaves fiddle, meddle, tinker, and trifle as my final four and the yellow group.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Responses to 'how are you': Chilling, managing, not bad, same old
- 🟩 Kinds of mats: Prayer, welcome, wrestling, yoga
- 🟦 AKC dog breed groups: Herding, hound, sporting, toy
- 🟪 Horror movies with last letter changed: Halloweek, hosted, jawn, psychs
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,233 which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
I went down the line today, though I fumbled a bit trying to get yellow on my first try. I knew not bad and same old were probably related, but I thought welcome might be among the mix too. After striking out once, I realized managing and chilling rounded out the rest of the catagory.
I tried to think of other uses for welcome, and came up with welcome mat, which led me to wrestling, yoga, and prayer to solve green.
AKC competitions are a staple around the holidays in my household, and I own a toy dog, so I was kicking myself for taking so long to see blue today. Herding, hound, and sporting make up the rest of the category.
I was scratching my head over what the heck jawn could be, and once I saw the category revealed, I realized the Connections crew embrace chaos. Halloweek, hosted, and psychs make up the rest of a particularly tricky purple category today.
