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Today's puzzle wants you to recall grammar lessons while blasting open center court.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 18 below.
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
- Wiki
- Pop
- Split
- Padre
- Pere
- Lump
- Blow
- Cheap
- Earp
- Pear
- Crack
- Royal
- Red
- Pair
- Twin
- Pare
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Words that sound alike
- 🟩 Green: Eruption
- 🟦 Blue: Basketball
- 🟪 Purple: ___ of the loom
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: Homophones
- 🟩 Green: Rupture
- 🟦 Blue: MLB player
- 🟪 Purple: Fruit anagrams
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 18 for puzzle #1,072 are a bit harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.2 out of 5.
- 🟨 Homophones: Pair, pare, pear, pere
- 🟩 Rupture: Blow, crack, pop, split
- 🟦 MLB player: Padre, red, royal, twin
- 🟪 Fruit anagrams: Cheap, earp, lump, wiki
All the homophones starting with "p" (pair, pare, pear, and pere) were what first stood out to me in today's puzzle, a connection so simple I figured it had to be yellow. I was right.
After that I started looking for any synonyms for blue or green, and came up with block, crack, pop, and split.
I'm not the biggest sports fan, but I've seen Serra Padre and Devin Royal make headlines enough that I figured basketball had to be in the mix. After striking out with a few guesses, I eventually stumbled on the other two in the blue category: red and twin.
That left some fruit-themed anagrams for today's rote fill for purple: cheap, earp, lump, and wiki.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Conduit: Duct, line, main, pipe
- 🟩 Swindle: Fleece, hose, squeeze, stiff
- 🟦 Tea-making verbs: Boil, pour, steep, strain
- 🟪 "School" modifiers: Grade, grammar, high, primary
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,071, which had a difficulty rating of 1.5 out of 5.
I kicked things off today by solving the hardest category with a bunch of words that come before "school": grade, grammar, high, and primary.
After that I jumped to the other side of the difficulty spectrum with duct, line, main, and pipe to solve yellow.
At first I thought hose might be connected to the other conduit words, but once I realized I still had that clue to go, I realized the Connections crew had another meaning for it in mind. I threw in fleece, squeeze, and stiff along with it to solve green.
That left just enough time for a cuppa with blue: boil, pour, steep, and strain.
