Today's puzzle requires some force as you flee a horror icon.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for September 9 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,186. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,185, 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
- Incomprehensible
- Electromagnetic
- Nanotechnology
- Arachnophobia
- Microbrewery
- Bewildering
- Picosecond
- Halloween
- Esoteric
- Minivan
- Opaque
- Brute
- Task
- Saw
- It
- G
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Tricky
- 🟩 Green: Tiny
- 🟦 Blue: Scary
- 🟪 Purple: Make
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: Hard to understand
- 🟩 Green: Words with "small" prefixes
- 🟦 Blue: Horror movies
- 🟪 Purple: Words before "force"
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 9 for puzzle #1,186 are an eensy bit harder yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Hard to understand: Bewildering, esoteric, incomprehensible, opaque
- 🟩 Words with "small" prefixes: Microbrewery, minivan, nanotechnology, picosecond
- 🟦 Horror movies: Arachnophobia, halloween, it, saw
- 🟪 Words before "force": Brute, electromagnetic, g, task
Writing out today's puzzle in order is interesting as the words appear to go down by one letter from Incomprehensible to G. Let's see if that matters.
Because I saw the puzzle rating before starting, I automatically assumed the set of microbrewery, minivan, nanotechnology, and picosecond was actually a blue or purple set, so I was surprised that it was green.
To reset, I put the horror movies together: Halloween, It, Saw and Arachnophobia, which was the blue set. This was more surprising to me, if only because I am a fan of the horror genre, so I spotted those four immediately.
With the final 8, I finally saw the Force connection of brute, electromagnetic, G and task.
This left bewildering, esoteric, incomprehensible and opaque.
The descending order didn't seem to matter, but it was fun to spot.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Classic American Performance Cars: Corvette, Firebird, Mustang, Viper
- 🟩 Features Of A Mime Costume: Beret, Gloves, Stripes, Suspenders
- 🟦 ___ Heart: Artichoke, Purple, Sacred, Take To
- 🟪 Candy Bars Plus A Letter: Doves, Marsh, Skort, Twixt
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,185, which had a difficulty rating of 1.7 out of 5.
I went a little out of order today, but I got the job done in the end, no matter how unconventional it was.
Things started off normally, sliding right into yellow with the muscle cars. I'm a Mustang guy myself, but I like all of the cars in the category.
From there, I noticed that Twixt isn't a commonly used word (I don't think I've ever used it in daily conversation). Then I saw Doves and connected it to candy bars with an extra letter, locking in purple.
From there, it was smooth sailing as I figured out the mime costume and locked in ___ heart with the process of elimination.
