Today's puzzle says good night and good morning.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for August 28 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,174. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,173, 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
- Morning
- Sweet Dreams
- Top Spot
- Era
- Pops
- Noon
- Hour
- Bro
- Night
- Mom
- Maxxing
- Line
- Sis
- Rest Easy
- Coded
- Sleep Tight
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Sleepy-bye
- 🟩 Green: Front to back
- 🟦 Blue: Slang
- 🟪 Purple: Phrase it
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: Bedtime parting words
- 🟩 Green: Palindromes
- 🟦 Blue: Modern add-ons/combining forms
- 🟪 Purple: Top of the ____
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 August 28 for puzzle #1,174 are much harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Electric things: Electric eel, lightning, live wire, pikachu
- 🟩 Moved to tears: Choked up, emotional, misty, overcome
- 🟦 Shades of gray: Ash, dove, pewter, slate
- 🟪Music genre plus starting letter: Brock, nemo, spunk, wrap
I took an early strike, throwing together the bro, pops, sis and mom just to see. Instead, I pivoted to meme words.
I was trying to figure out maxxing when I decided to look for slang words, which got me to coded and bro. It took a moment to click between sis and era. Blue set down.
However, I did stick with sis to find the palindromes with mom, noon and top spot.
I had seen top of the with morning, hour and line, but I could not find the fourth word until now. A brief Google search suggested Top of the Pops is a British music show. I watch some British TV like Taskmaster, but this is not one I had ever heard of. I assume this is what makes today's set a 3.3 difficulty if it has a lot of American solvers.
This left night, rest easy, sleep tight and sweet dreams as the final four.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Electric things: Electric eel, lightning, live wire, pikachu
- 🟩 Moved to tears: Choked up, emotional, misty, overcome
- 🟦 Shades of gray: Ash, dove, pewter, slate
- 🟪Music genre plus starting letter: Brock, nemo, spunk, wrap
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,173, which had a difficulty rating of 1.7 out of 5.
I tried a Pokemon set just to see at the start, but it was obviously wrong.
So I started with Pikachu to chase electrical things with live wire, electric eel and lightning.
Misty put me on the tears path with choked up, emotional, and overcome.
It wasn't Ash but Pewter (I was thinking Pewter City) when I put together the blue set of dove and slate.
Which left Brock and the music genres hidden in nemo, spunk, and wrap.
