Today's puzzle gets tricky with lesser-known vowels and green brick roads.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for August 3 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,149. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,148, 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
- Needless
- Myrrh
- Backstreet
- Tea set
- Nsync
- Sage
- Fly by
- Nag champa
- Mint
- Byway
- Bug fix
- Rhythm
- Forest
- Lane
- Hunter
- Alley
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Robert Frost
- 🟩 Green: Envy
- 🟦 Blue: Sometimes this vowel
- 🟪 Purple: Starts with little sibling energy
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: Road less traveled
- 🟩 Green: Shades of green
- 🟦 Blue: 'Y' is the only vowel
- 🟪 Purple: Starting with synonyms for 'pester'
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 3 for puzzle #1,149 are a lot harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 4.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Roads less traveled: Alley, backstreet, byway, lane
- 🟩 Shades of green: Forest, hunter, mint, sage
- 🟦 'Y' is the only vowel: Fly by, myrrh, nysnc, rhythm
- 🟪 Starting with synonyms for 'pester': Bug fix, nag champa, needless, tea set
Today's puzzle was a brutal one, but I managed to make it down the line today. I had hoped the yellow category was a Robert Frost reference, and I was right. The answers are alley, backstreet, byway, and lane.
After that I dipped into a bit of color theory to find the suitably green category, with forest, hunter, mint, and sage.
Then it was onto blue, which took me a while until I remembered that, sometimes, y is a vowel, and that's one fly by, myrrh, nsync, and rhythm, all shared.
That left purple as today's rote fill with bug fix, nag champa, needless, and tea set.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Filler words: Actually, like, so, well
- 🟩 By means of: By, per, through, via
- 🟦 ___ mode: Airplane, beast, dark, a la
- 🟪 U.S. airport codes plus starting letter: Asea, flax, lord, olga
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,148, which had a difficulty rating of 2.5 out of 5.
I hopped straight into the lukewarm end with green today, spotting a quartet of synonyms with by, per, through, and via.
Then I kicked back a bit and solved the easiest categories with a few auditory pitfalls: (um) actually, like, so, and well.
Blue (airplane, beast, dark, a la) took me a little longer because the connections with a missing word never quite click right away.
That left purple as today's rote fill with asea, flax, lord, and olga.
