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Today's puzzle wants you to cook some strong music for the day.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 20 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
- High
- Key
- Intensity
- Independence
- Might
- Mode
- Medium
- Interval
- Training
- Off
- Force
- Simmer
- Concentration
- Groundhog
- The Longest
- Scale
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Cooking
- 🟩 Green: Strong
- 🟦 Blue: Play a note
- 🟪 Purple: Bill Murray
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: Stove knob settings
- 🟩 Green: Potency
- 🟦 Blue: Music theory concepts
- 🟪 Purple: "____ Day" movies
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 20 for puzzle #1,074 are the same difficulty as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Stove knob settings: High, medium, off, simmer
- 🟩 Potency: Concentration, force, intensity, might
- 🟦 Music theory concepts: Interval, key, mode, scale
- 🟪 "____ Day" movies: Groundhog, independence, the longest, training
I ended up going reverse rainbow today. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I solve Connections on something of a vibes basis, where I take the sets as they come to me, so reverse rainbows are always a pleasant surprise.
So, I saw The Longest and immediately thought of the The Longest Yard movie, take your pick the Burt Reynolds or Adam Sandler one. The Longest Day is not that. I was initially looking for Yards before I saw Training and found Training Day. That led me to Groundhog and Independence before I switched The Longest.
Maybe its the crosswordese but I locked into the musicl theory words next with key and mode. Scale and interval were quick finds from there.
It did take a moment with the final 8 for potency to click in concentration, force, intensity and might. Though I'm not sure what I was looking for since the cooking words were obvious.
That included high, medium, off and simmer.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Things babies do: Babble, cry, nurse, teethe
- 🟩 Modify deceptively: Alter, cook, doctor, fudge
- 🟦 Judy Blume books: Blubber, deenie, forever, superfudge
- 🟪 Fish minus a letter: Founder, salon, surgeon, trot
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,073, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5.
I found today's puzzle tricky, largely due to Judy Blume. More on that in a moment.
My way in was Founder, which I misread as Flounder. Initially, I was looking for Little Mermaid character misspellings before I switched to fish. That's how I got to sturgeon, trout and eventually salmon.
My next word was cook when I thought of the phrase cook the books. This helped me get to doctor, fudge and alter.
I still wasn't sure of the blue set, so I took the baby behaviors in babble, cry, nurse, teethe.
Which left Blubber, Deenie, Forever and Superfudge. I realized that despite her extensive catalog I've only read Judy Blume's Ramona books. So all four of these titles were unfamiliar to me except Superfudge which I recalled reading once I looked up a cover.
