Sunday, November 16 Clues And Answers (#889)

Today’s Connections

Credit: NYT / Erik Kain

Looking for a little help with today’s Connections? You’ve come to the right place. Read on for some extra clues to get you to the finish line as well as the answers to today’s puzzle.

We’re past the halfway point in November already. Time waits for no man. We might even get snow this weekend, which is crazy. It’s been such a pleasant November. I’m not sure I’m ready to freeze just yet. As always, we have our Sunday Connections to solve and it’s a bit of a tricky one, though far from the most challenging I’ve played. I got a couple guess wrong on my path to victory.

Be sure to also check out my latest weekend streaming guide to for all the best new shows and movies out this weekend. As the days and nights grow chillier, it’s never a bad thing to have some new stuff to watch and there have been so many great new shows and movies out this year – it’s hard to keep up!

Alright, let’s solve this Connections!

If you’re looking for Saturday’s Connections guide, it’s right here.

How To Solve Today’s NYT Connections

How To Play Connections

Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.

The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.

There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.

You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles.

NYT Connections Hints And Answers – Sunday, November 16

These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers. First, here are today’s Connections words:

• RUGBY SHIRT
• PEDESTRIAN
• APPROACH
• AVENUE
• BARCODE
• EVERYDAY
• SCHOOL
• TAX
• IBM LOGO
• BANAL
• RAILROAD
• PHILOSOPHY
• HUMDRUM
• ZEBRA
• METHOD
• PARKING

Hints for the Connections groups today are:

• 🟡Yellow group – A way of grouping beliefs or ideas, or tackles intellectual notions.
• 🔵Blue group – This one is very visual. Think of patterns.
• 🟢Green group – So basic.
• 🟣Purple group – Found in a famous board game.

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

• 🟡Yellow group – Technique
• 🔵Blue group – Stripy things
• 🟢Green group – Run-of-the-mill
• 🟣Purple group – Words on Monopoly squares

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:

• 🟡Yellow group – Approach, Method, Philosophy, School
• 🔵Blue group – Barcode, IBM Logo, Rugby Shirt, Zebra
• 🟢Green group – Banal, Everyday, Humdrum, Pedestrian
• 🟣Purple group – Avenue, Parking, Railroad, Tax

The red herring in today’s Connections were “driving” words. Car words. PEDESTRIAN, AVENUE, PARKING, even RAILROAD in a sense. Oddly, three of those red herrings were all in the Purple group. Often, with Connections puzzles, these words are spread out among all four groups. I suppose you could toss SCHOOL in there and even APPROACH as they all sound like words having to do with getting somewhere, and the “where” could be the SCHOOL with its PARKING lot and PEDESTRIAN crossing.

What leapt out at me, however, were the words BARCODE and ZEBRA. These were obviously both stripy things, and I paired them with RUGBY SHIRT and the IBM LOGO even though I wasn’t entirely sure about either of those, simply because nothing else made sense. I was correct and moved on to BANAL and HUMDRUM, which were clearly words about basic, boring stuff. EVERYDAY stuff. It’s all very PEDESTRIAN. With Green and Blue out of the way, I was a little stuck on the remaining batch of eight words.

Soon enough, however, it became clear that a PHILOSOPHY is just a SCHOOL of thought, one where you might learn the Socratic METHOD, which isn’t a bad APPROACH to interrogating one’s beliefs. Even before I was done grouping these, I realized that the remaining words were undoubtedly related to Monopoly, a game I haven’t played in a long, long time. It’s honestly kind of a frustrating game, but I suppose we all get off on making money, even when it’s fake money, and it’s pretty fun when someone lands on your hotel and has to pay up.

How did you do on today’s Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

Find more guides to Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword on my blog where you can also follow me for TV and movie and video game coverage. Read my weekend streaming guide right here.