Today's puzzle is not about trains, but that's a starting track.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for September 15 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,192. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,191, 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
- Plant
- Coach
- Whistle
- Dessert
- Handle
- Caboose
- December
- Sleeper
- Direct
- Train
- Lid
- Asset
- Spout
- Mole
- Epilogue
- Guide
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Teach
- 🟩 Green: Tea time
- 🟦 Blue: Spies
- 🟪 Purple: It's over
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: Instruct
- 🟩 Green: Parts of a whistling kettle
- 🟦 Blue: Undercover operative
- 🟪 Purple: Things that appear at the end
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 September 15 for puzzle #1,192 are the same difficulty as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Instruct: Coach, direct, guide, train
- 🟩 Parts of a whistling kettle: Handle, lid, spout, whistle
- 🟦 Undercover operative: Asset, mole, plant, sleeper
- 🟪 Things that appear at the end: Caboose, december, dessert, epilogue
For today's puzzle, I attempted a train set of coach, caboose, sleeper, and cabin, but that didn't work. As always, the obvious clue sets tend to be split individually among the four groups, so it gives you a starting point.
Still thinking about trains, I used whistle to get to the tea set with handle, lid and spout.
Plant clued me into the spies, which was confirmed with asset, mole and sleeper.
I then spotted the endings with caboose, December, dessert and epilogue.
This left coach, direct, guide and train as my final four.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Waterbirds: Coot, goose, loon, teal
- 🟩 Informant: Canary, rat, snitch, stoolie
- 🟦 Common single-use plastic items: Bag, cutlery, stirrer, straw
- 🟪 ___ grass: Blue, crab, lemon, wheat
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,191 which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5.
I went down the line with today's puzzle, starting with some birds that, having grown up around water, I've been seeing since I was a tot: coot, goose, loon, and teal.
After that came green with a quartet of synonyms for those who get stitches: canary, rat, snitch, and stoolie. Admittedly I had to look up with stoolie meant (turns out it has nothing to do with spoolie).
Then came blue with some common staples of a take-out order, i.e. bag, cutlery, stirrer, and straw.
That left purple as today's rote fill with blue, crab, lemon, and wheat.
