NYT Connections today hints and answers — Sunday, May 4 (#693)

Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on May 4 for puzzle #693 are much easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.5 out of 5.

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.

Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #692, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #693. 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.

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.

Today's Connections words are: Chewy, Noodle, Cars, Darth, Jam, Boba, Tough, Shred, Solo, Dry, Sugar, Bluto, Tea, Genus, Stringy, Milk

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

• 🟨 Yellow: Qualities of overcooked meat
• 🟩 Green: Play some electric guitar
• 🟦 Blue: Ingredients in bubble tea
• 🟪 Purple: Planets/dwarf planets with first letter changed

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: Strum up a tune, grab a drink, and throw on some BBQ while you turn your gaze to the stars (but not too far, far away).

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #693?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Qualities of overcooked meat: Chewy, Dry, Stringy, Tough
• 🟩 Play some electric guitar: Jam, Noodle, Shred, Solo
• 🟦 Ingredients in bubble tea: Boba, Milk, Sugar, Tea
• 🟪 Planets/dwarf planet with first letter changed: Bluto, Cars, Darth, Genus

I didn't get off to a great start today. I first struck out trying to find some Star Wars connection, because with Darth, Chewy, Boba, and Solo on the board, that seemed a given. Once I realized that was a dead end, I started looking for the only other Boba I know, Boba tea, which netted me Milk, Sugar, and Tea for the blue category.

After that came green, though with Boba tea on the brain, it took me forever to realize Noodle wasn't talking about the slurping kind. Jam, Shred, and Solo rounded out the rest of the category.

I was scratching my head over where to go next, but after a minute or so I finally got yellow next with Chewy, Dry, Stringy, and Tough.

That left only Bluto, Cars, Darth, and Genus as the purple category, which was a particularly hard one today.

Yesterday's Connections answers

• 🟨 Awesome: Dope, fire, lit, sick
• 🟩 Defeat soundly: Cream, lick, paste, smoke
• 🟦 "Will contractions without the apostrophe: Hell, ill, shell, well
• 🟪 URL endings plus a letter: Comp, milk, neti, orgo

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #692, which had a difficulty rating of 4.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

So, did I take three strikes on the yellow group? Yes. So, that's how my go at this puzzle started.

I had dope, sick, fire and ill pretty much immediately. Strike 1, but one away. So, I swapped out sick for lit. Strike 2, still one away. Dropped fire for sick. Strike 3, but one away. I don't know why I was so dogged on this group but I kept going and finally kicked out ill. And we got it with dope, fire, lit, and sick.

This did make me wary for the rest of the puzzle since I had no more errors to give.

Fortunately, the green group was easier when I saw smoke and thought, "You just got smoked by this puzzle." That clicked for me and getting paste, then lick and ending with cream wrapped up that set.

I lied a bit at top, my first pursuit was Neti pot, so I was looking for other pots but that fell apart fairly quickly beyond paste pot and cream pot.

Anyway, I took a stupid swing on the blue category when I literally thought, these four words; hell, shell, well and ill, all have double Ls. Which is probably more of a green or yellow level category not the blue, which was sort of proven right with the "will" contractions.

And we ended up with URL endings plus a letter: comp, milk, neti, and orgo.

Hopefully, Sunday is kinder to us or at least me.