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Today's puzzle is pretty easy, especially if you're a little hungry.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 15 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
- Saw
- Jordan
- Cross
- Pitt
- Elba
- Palm
- Ciao
- Ford
- Wade
- Bird
- Was
- Curry
- James
- Peek
- Able
- Traverse
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Oregon Trail obstacle
- 🟩 Green: Basketball
- 🟦 Blue: Napoleon said what?
- 🟪 Purple: Puppy
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: Navigate through, as a river
- 🟩 Green: Multi-time NBA MVPs
- 🟦 Blue: Non-palindromic words in a famous palindrome
- 🟪 Purple: Homophones of kinds of dogs, familiarly
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 15 for puzzle #1,069 are a bit harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 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
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?
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Premonition: Gut feeling, hunch, intuition, sixth sense
- 🟩 Cellphone modes: Do not disturb, ring, silent, vibrate
- 🟦 Bad things to do in modern dating: Breadcrumb, catfish, ghost, love bomb
- 🟪 Phrases whose second words include their first word: Air cairo, all hallows, arm warmer, the others
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,068, which had a difficulty rating of 2. out of 5.
I'm not sure if the ghost films in today's grid is a trap but I fell for it. So don't put Ghost, Ring, The Others and Sixth Sense together. However, that does give me a way to see the other categories.
I started with Ring and followed the modes to do not disturb, vibrate and silent.
I still wasn't sure on the purple or blue yet, so I took the yellow set of guesses gut feeling, hunch, sixth sense and intuition.
Having the final eight finally clicked the words hidden in other words for the purple set. So we have the others, arm warmer, all hallows, and air cairo.
Which left ghost, lovebomb, catfish and breadcrumb. My issue was that I'm not familiar with the term breadcrumb. It makes sense upon looking it up.
It's considered a manipulation tactic where a person leaves "breadcrumbs" that indicate interest, which strings the other party along. Quite mean.
