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Today's puzzle is surprisingly tricky considering the rating.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 31 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,085. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,084, 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
- Butter
- Salt
- Steak
- Break
- Jack
- Soak
- Spine
- Rubber Duck
- Tar
- Rack
- School Bus
- Pikachu
- Sea Dog
- Sash
- Cue
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: The ___ brick road
- 🟩 Green: 8-ball
- 🟦 Blue: A pirate's life
- 🟪 Purple: Trees plus a letter
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: Things that are yellow
- 🟩 Green: Billiard terms
- 🟦 Blue: Slang for a sailor
- 🟪 Purple: Kinds of wood plus 's'
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 May 31 for puzzle #1,085 are the same difficulty as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 out of 5.
- 🟨 Things that are yellow: Butter, pikachu, rubber duck, school bus
- 🟩 Billiard terms: Break, cue, pocket, rack
- 🟦 Slang for a sailor: Jack, salt, sea dog, tar
- 🟪 Kinds of wood plus 's': Sash, soak, spine, steak
I kicked off today's puzzle with the green category after recognizing pocket and cue likely had to do with billiards. I looked around for other similar words and got rack and break.
Pikachu was really throwing me, but then I realized I was thinking too hard about it. Butter, rubber duck, and school bus rounded out an extra yellow yellow category today.
I grew up in a huge navy town, so blue wasn't too hard to spot with a bunch of slang for sailors like jack, salt, sea dog, and tar (the only one I hadn't heard of).
That left purple as today's rote fill with sash, soak, spine, and steak.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 "In your dreams": Impossible, never, no way, sorry
- 🟩 Sensible: Clear, lucid, right, sound
- 🟦 Typographical symbols: Brace, caret, pipe, tilde
- 🟪 Song of the year nominees at the first Grammy Award: Fever, gigi, volare, witchcraft
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,084, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
Sometimes I really question the Connections ratings for its puzzles. Yesterday's was a 3 that was a relative breeze. Today's 2-rated puzzle I solved by what felt like the skin of my teeth.
First I took two strikes trying to make a dreaming set work with lucid, fever, pipe and impossible. I swapped out impossible for clear. Pausing let me find the "in your dreams" set with impossible, never, no way and sorry.
I stayed away from lucid then instead trying to figure out caret. Tilde clicked the typographical symbols, after another strike when I just threw some words together to clear my mind. I got tilde, caret and then brace. It took a moment to find pipe mostly because I usually think of these | just as lines versus /s.
The sensible words finally clicked here with clear, lucid, right and sound.
And the purple set of Fever, Gigi, Volare and Witchcraft is a trivia question I was never going to get. I don't even know who won the Grammy's this year. I do not care for award shows.
