Today's puzzle gets nostalgic for women's sports.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for August 22 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,168. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,167, 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
- Bitter
- Spice
- Mean
- Winter
- Hammer
- Cone
- Plane
- Jet
- Golden
- Saw
- Mist
- Musk
- Gilmore
- Chisel
- Water
- Shower
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Woodworking
- 🟩 Green: Fruity
- 🟦 Blue: Waterworks
- 🟪 Purple: Ladies
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: Carpentry tools
- 🟩 Green: Kinds of melon
- 🟦 Blue: Garden hose settings
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Girls of pop culure
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 22 for puzzle #1,168 are easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Carpentry tools: Chisel, hammer, plane, saw
- 🟩 Kinds of melon: Bitter, musk, water, winter
- 🟦 Garden hose settings: Cone, jet, mist shower
- 🟪____ Girls of pop culture: Gilmore, golden, mean, spice
I was on the girls train almost immediately with Gilmore Girls, then it was a simple matter of finding Golden Girls, Spice Girls and Mean Girls.
Of the remaining three, in a harder puzzle anyone of them could be yellow. So I was just guessing color at this point.
Chisel, hammer, place and saw make up the yellow.
Melons get bitter, musk, water and winter ( this probably should have been the blue.
Then we have garden hoses with cone, jet, mist, and shower.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Things most animals need: Nutrition, oxygen, sleep, water
- 🟩 Calls to begin a performance: Action, curtain up, places, showtime
- 🟦 ____ Kids: Comeback, karate, sundance, wimpy
- 🟪 Once in a ____: Blue moon, generation, lifetime, while
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,167, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
I was honestly thinking of the beer when I focused in on Blue Moon, the phrase once in a generation came to mind as I looked for beer-related terms. That clicked the term for me, with once in a lifetime and once in a while.
I didn't initially spot the blue set, but finding the green and yellow sets let me separate out comeback kids, karate kids, sundance kids and wimpy kids.
Then it was a coin flip between which set was green and which was yellow. Yellow tends to be nouns à la nutrition, oxygen, sleep and water. Green tends to be verbs or directions à la action, curtain up, places and showtime. That was how I made my choice between the two sets.
