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Student tasks include assignments, drills, exercises, and lessons.
Encouragement words signal you’re getting close or almost there.
Open phrases show flexibility and readiness.
If you’re a fan of Wordle, Spelling Bee, or The Mini, there’s a good chance you’ve already found yourself hooked on Connections. This daily word game from The New York Times has quickly become a favorite among puzzle enthusiasts, offering a unique blend of vocabulary, lateral thinking, and pattern recognition that challenges your brain in fresh ways every day. With its vibrant colors, tricky categories, and those satisfying ‘aha!’
A fresh puzzle is released each night at midnight with 16 words that have nothing to do with one another. Your job is to identify four sets of four related words, which can be easy or wonderfully finicky. But here’s the problem: you have just four incorrect guesses before the game is over, so each guess is critical. That creates an element of strategy, where you think before you act and occasionally use a trial-and-error approach.
The game employs an intelligent color-code scheme to mark difficulty levels: yellow for simple groups, blue and green for medium/hard challenges, and purple for the hardest sets. If you are ever stuck, you can reshuffle the board to reconfigure the words and take a different approach, which usually gets you out of your mental rut.
Yellow: Student Assignments
Blue: Incentivizing Phrases in a Guessing Game
Green: Phrases that Mean ‘Open to Anything’
Purple: Words Connected by the Letter ‘A’
Also Read: NYT Connections May 17, 2025: Puzzle Hints, Tips, and Solutions Revealed
Here’s how the words belong in their categories:
Yellow (Student Assignments): Assignment, Drill, Exercise, Lesson
These are all common assignments students face, whether at school or sports practice—familiar but critical components of studying.
Blue (Incentivizing): Almost, Close, Not Quite, Warm
Words you’d use to encourage someone who’s nearly there, signaling they’re on the right track.
Green (Open to Anything): Easy, Flexible, Game, Open
These words all express a willingness to go along with whatever comes next—being adaptable and ready for anything.
Purple (Linked by ‘A’): Area, Athletic, Excellent, One
The most difficult group of the day, linked primarily by the fact of having the letter ‘A’ and implied connections to grades or rankings. ‘Excellent’ and ‘one’ work well with the theme, but ‘area’ and ‘athletic’ are a bit of a stretch, so this set has some controversy surrounding it.
Whether you completed today’s Connections quickly or took a couple of attempts, every puzzle offers a new brain teaser to play with. It’s the ideal way to keep your thinking sharp, challenge your mind, and experience the excitement of wordplay. Don’t forget to visit tomorrow for another set of creative categories and rewarding ‘aha!’ moments that make Connections one of the greatest daily puzzles to date.
