Tips and answers on “Connections” from today’s NYT for Thursday, September 26

Are you looking for tips and answers on Wednesday's Communities instead? You can find them here:

ForbesTips and answers on today's NYT's “Connections” for Wednesday, September 25From Kris Holt

Happy Thursday, folks! Even though summer ended literally a few days ago, I just submitted my holiday gift recommendations on my other gig. Winter, as the Starks say, is coming.

Today’s NYT Connections Clues and answers coming soon.

How to play connections

Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. Every day at midnight you get a new puzzle. You can NYT Website or game app.

You are presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to sort these into four groups of four by finding the connections between them. The groups can be things like clickable items, names of participants in research studies, or words preceded by a body part.

Each puzzle has only one solution. You must be careful with words that could fit into more than one category. You can mix the words up to see if there are any connections between them.

Each group is color-coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to understand, blue and green are in between, and the purple group is usually the most difficult. The purple group often includes wordplay.

Choose four words that you think go together and press submit. If you guess wrong, you lose a life. When you're close to getting a correct group, you may see a message letting you know that you're one word away from the correct group, but you still need to figure out which one to swap out.

If you make four mistakes, it's game over. Let's make sure that doesn't happen with some tips. And if you're really having trouble, today's Connections Answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, you can easily share the results with your friends on social media and group chats.

What are today's connection tips?

Scroll slowly! Immediately after the instructions for each of today’s Connections Groups, I will tell you which groups they are without immediately telling you which words belong in these groups.

Today's 16 words are…

• SOURCES
• KRAUSE
• BIKINI
• WAX
• TRIM
• CHEESE
• CLEAN
• BORDER
• GROW
• DRY
• BEAN
• VIRGO
• THEORY
• STRAIGHT
• MARGIN AREA
• ASSEMBLY

And the clues for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group – pretty extremities
• Green Group – Level Up
• Blue Group – Drink Instructions
• Purple group – perhaps hanging by a thread

What are today's Connections groups?

Need additional help?

Be warned: We are starting to Spoiler territory.

Today's groups are …

• Yellow group – decorative edge
• Green group – increase in some way
• Blue Group – Requirements for a bartender
• Purple Group – String ____

What are today's Connections answers?

Warning, spoilers! Don’t scroll down until you’re ready to see today’s Connections Answer.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections Answers are …

• Yellow group – decorative edge (EDGE, GRID, FRINGE, BORDER)
• Green group – increasing in some way (GROWING, ASCENDING, SWELLING, GROWING)
• Blue Group – Requirements for a bartender (DRY, NEAT, STRAIGHT, VIRGIN)
• Purple Group – String ____ (BEAN, BIKINI, CHEESE, THEORY)

Unfortunately, my three-day winning streak is over. This is what happened to me:

🟦🟦🟦🟦

🟨🟩🟨🟩

🟩🟩🟪🟩

🟨🟪🟨🟨

🟪🟨🟪🟨

As you can see, I was pretty confused today. When I saw VIRGIN, I was sure it had something to do with either olive oil or drinks. At least that helped me get rid of the blues.

I had an idea about the yellows and greens, but I've never heard GRILL or WAX used in those respective contexts. I definitely should have thought about the purple group though. That's going to bug me for a while.

That's all for today Connections Hints and answers. If you need hints and the solution for Friday's game, be sure to check out my blog.

PS: I recently included a song by this band, but since Snow Patrol just announced their first North American tour since 2019 and I plan on going to one of the shows, I thought I'd make a double. Fun fact: While the members are mostly from Northern Ireland, Snow Patrol was founded at my alma mater in Scotland: