Today's puzzle will make you hungry, or maybe that's just me.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for August 20 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,166. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,165, 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
- Telephone
- Apostrophe
- Oxford
- Serial
- Hawaiian
- Okina
- Ratchet
- Comma
- White
- Pigment
- Atomic
- Dragonfly
- Diavola
- Cedilla
- Meat Lovers
- Social Security
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Speciality
- 🟩 Green: Numerical
- 🟦 Blue: Grammatical
- 🟪 Purple: Dòngwù
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: Kinds of pizza
- 🟩 Green: Kinds of numbers
- 🟦 Blue: Similarly shaped typographical marks
- 🟪 Purple: Starting with Chinese Zodiac animals
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 20 for puzzle #1,166 are harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Kinds of pizza: Diavola, Hawaiian, meat lovers, white
- 🟩 Kinds of numbers: Atomic, serial, Social Security, telephone
- 🟦 Similarly shaped typographical marks: Apostrophe, cedilla, comma, okina
- 🟪 Starting with Chinese Zodiac animals: Dragonfly, oxford, pigment, ratchet
Maybe I'm hungry, but I grabbed the yellow set first with the pizzas of diavolo, meta lovers, Hawaiian, and white.
I had to look up cedilla; it's not a word I'm familiar with, but that got me on the typography chain. This led to apostrophe, comma and okina.
Serial clued me into the numbers with Social Security and atomic, then telephone.
This left the Chinese Zodiac set of dragonfly, oxford, pigment, and ratchet.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Piece of cake: Breeze, cinch, picnic, snap
- 🟩 Conceal: Blanket, hide, mask, obscure
- 🟦 Words before "ball" in sport names: Base, basket, foot, pickle
- 🟪 Homophones of CGI-animated films: Ants, cocoa, rheo, seoul
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,165, which had a difficulty rating of 1.3 out of 5.
On the whole, I didn't find making the connections difficult but I did find the red highlighted blocks surprisingly distracting.
Obscure was my word to start today's puzzle. I used that to find mask, then hide and it took a moment to find blanket but we got there.
Pickleball is how I got to the next set with football, basketball and baseball.
I wasn't totally sure about the purple set at the beginning because of Ants, but I tried it now with Coco (cocoa), Rheo (Rio), Seoul (Soul) and Antz.
Which left the cake for dessert in breeze, cinch, picnic and snap.
