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Today's puzzle asks you to go back to school in the 80s when Pluto was still a planet.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for April 23 below.
Article continues belowWhat 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
- Mother
- My
- Neighbor
- Totoro
- Touch
- Whammy
- Skirt
- Science
- Pulp
- Educated
- Literary
- Asiago
- Devote
- Very
- Historical
- Flank
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: Border
- 🟩 Green: Kinds of fiction
- 🟦 Blue: Words in a planetary mnemonic
- 🟪 Purple: Starting with four-letter 80's band
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 April 23 for puzzle #1,047 are the same difficulty as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at just 2.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Border: Flank, neighbor, skirt, touch
- 🟩 Kinds of fiction: Historical, literary, pulp, science
- 🟦 Words in a planetary mnemonic: Educated, mother, my, very
- 🟪 Starting wtih four-letter '80s bands: Asiago, devote, totoro, whammy
Normally, a "trap" like My Neighbor Totoro feels more impactful because the trap is four words. It doesn't really work in today's puzzle. However, it did get me itching to give the film a rewatch.
I started with Totoro because I assumed it had a hidden word in it. That and Asiago clued me into the 80's bands theme. So we have Totoro, Asiago, Devote, and Whammy.
I actually thought the fictional words of historical, literary, pulp and science were the blue category, so I was a tad surprised to see the set pop up green.
The yellow group of flank, neighbor, skirt, and touch was my next set.
Admittedly, I never used mnemonics to learn growing up and still don't beyond Roy G. Biv. They tended to go in one ear and out the other. With that, I never connected what educated, mother, my, and very.
I think others will pick up the blue set earlier than I did, and I am curious if the My Very Educated Mother mnemonic is a US thing or if it's one that other English-speaking places use to remember the planets.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Pottery equipment: Clay, glaze, kiln, wheel
- 🟩 Wallop: Deck, punch, slug, sock
- 🟦 Words pronounced different ways as proper nouns: Herb, nice, polish, reading
- 🟪 Pick-up ____: Artist, game, sticks, truck
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1046, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5.
So sticks was my way into the puzzle when I thought pick up sticks while looking at it. That got me to pick up game and then truck. It took a minute to find artist but I figured I was on the right path.
I took deck, punch, slug and sock next because slug stood out to me as hitting.
I never connected the blue so i took the yellow pottery set because it made sense with clay, glaze, kiln and wheel.
And I wrapped it all up with herb, nice, polish and reading which sound different when used as proper nouns. Reading is the one that threw me because I could not think of what it went with.
