Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 16 for puzzle #889 are a smidge easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.7 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.
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: Pedestrian, Barcode, Tax, Railroad, Zebra, Everyday, School, Avenue, Rugby Shirt, approach, Banal, Parking, Philosophy, Humdrum, IBM Logo, and Method
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Technique
- 🟩 Green: Run-of-the-mill
- 🟦 Blue: Stripy things
- 🟪 Purple: Words on Monopoly squares
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: Go directly to jail to get good at being boring
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #889?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Technique: Approach, Method, Philosophy, School
- 🟩 Run-of-the-mill: Banal, Everyday, Humdrum, Pedestrian
- 🟦 Stripy things: Barcode, IBM Logo, Rugby Shirt, Zebra
- 🟪 Words on Monopoly squares: Avenue, Parking, Railroad, Tax
Today's puzzle threw me for a loop because I would have bet money on the first connection I saw being yellow, and then once it wasn't, I felt like an idiot when the "easiest" connection didn't immediately pop out to me.
I kicked things off by picking up some unflashy synonyms (Banal, Everyday, Humdrum, and Pedestrian) for green.
Solving blue was also a piece of cake. IBM Logo seemed like the outlier initially, but once I saw Zebra, it all clicked. Rugby Shirt and Barcode rounded out blue.
That's when I started scratching my head. I had a family game night recently, so Avenue brought Monopoly to mind. I took a stab with Railroad, Parking, and Tax, even though I didn't remember a space for that last one (it's been a long time since I've played — we're more a Ticket to Ride kinda crowd) and solved purple.
With only Philosophy, Approach, School, and Method left for yellow, I was left kicking myself over not spotting it sooner.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Enhance the taste of: Flavor, salt, season, spice
- 🟩 Punctuation marks: Colon, dash, period, slash
- 🟦 Kinds of actors: Character, film, method, stage
- 🟪 ____ Zone: Buffer, comfort, time, twilight
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #888, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I saw dash and spice and was thinking of Mrs. Dash. So, I immediately took three strikes trying to force dash to work with flavor, salt, season, or spice. I didn't calm down until that third strike.
I finally woke up and dropped dash to complete the yellow set. So, that's how my day started.
Sticking with dash, I saw the punctuation marks in colon, period and slash. Time zone is what clicked with me next. Which is how I got twilight zone, buffer zone and comfort zone.
And I wrapped up the puzzle with character, film, method and stage as kinds of actors.
Connections tips — how to win at Connections
There are two ways to play Connections, get the answers as you solve them or solve for the hardest group, Purple, first.
For either playstyle, the best tip I can give is to not be afraid of the shuffle button, especially if you’ve solved a set but you’re certain it isn’t the Purple group. You can shuffle the grid until your solved quartet is in a somewhat staked off area.
For the purple group, you can expect to see a handful of category types: words missing a letter, homophones, words with specific suffixes or prefixes, and [blank] word (or word [blank]). There are others, but this is a majority of what you’ll see. It can help to look for purple connections through one of those lenses.
If you’re not hunting for purple specifically, then the best advice I have is to look for smaller connections. For example, Riddler and Joker are Batman villains. Once you’ve grouped that duo together it’s easier to find another set.
Finally, watch out for traps. Occasionally, the Connections makers like to throw in a set of words that should seem very obvious to most people. But picking them can give you a strike, something you want to save for when you aren’t really sure between a couple of clues.
The tricky bit is that sometimes the very obvious foursome is actually one of the answers (usually the yellow or green levels).
One way to work around this is to note the four clues you think are an obvious set. Highlight them by selecting the words but don’t hit submit. From there take a second look around the grid to see if anything else stands out to you.
Often these super obvious sets are actually individually spread out between the four groups. So, if you see Wick, Neo, Ted and Mnemonic, you might immediately think of Keanu Reeves movies, but it's a trick. Instead, use the individual words as launching points to discover other connections.
If you're new to the game you should also take a look at our How to play Connections guide.
Got some thoughts about today's puzzle you want to share? Email us at scott.younker@futurenet.com or alyse.stanley@futurenet.com to get in touch.
