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Today's puzzle wants you to play a little music quickly while taking a drink.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 16 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
- Thermostat
- Piano
- Play
- Fiddle
- Flute
- Forte
- Mess
- Bassoon
- Belfast
- Stein
- Largo
- Tumbler
- Tinker
- Nesquick
- Coupe
- Allegro
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Drinks on me
- 🟩 Green: Toy with
- 🟦 Blue: Concertina
- 🟪 Purple: Move quickly
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: Glassware
- 🟩 Green: Mess around (with)
- 🟦 Blue: Music performance directions
- 🟪 Purple: Ending in synonyms for "asap"
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 16 for puzzle #1,070 are a bit easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 out of 5.
- 🟨 Glassware: Coupe, flute, stein, tumbler
- 🟩 Mess around (with): Fiddle, mess, play, tinker
- 🟦 Music performance directions: Allegro, forte, largo, piano
- 🟪 Ending in synonyms for "asap": Bassoon, belfast, nesquick, thermostat
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Navigate through, as a river: Cross, ford, traverse, wade
- 🟩 Multi-time NBA MVPs: Bird, curry, james, jordan
- 🟦 Non-palindromic words in a famous palindrome: Able, elba, saw, was
- 🟪 Homophones of kinds of dogs, familiarly: Ciao, palm, peek, pitt
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,069, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5.
I found myself looking for other things in today's puzzle instead of what was there, except for the blue set. With Pitt, I spent too long looking for shows or universities.
The basketball greats set leapt out to me immediately, though I did take a strike trying to put Wade in before I saw that it was part of another set. So, we had Curry, James, Jordan and Bird.
I stuck with Wade to get to cross, ford and traverse next.
Was and saw clued me to the palindromes, which is why I picked elba and able. I looked up the palindrome sentence allegedly attributed to Napoleon but it did not ring any bells for me.
This left the dogs in ciao (chow chow), palm (pomeranian), peek (pekingese) and pitt (pitbull). This one really felt like it was stretching the way you say these words. Pom and palm really require you to swallow the 'l'. Do people call pekingese dogs, peeks?
