Sunday, November 23 Clues And Answers (#896)

Today’s Connections

Credit: NYT / Erik Kain

Welcome to this week’s Sunday Connections guide, Connectioneers! It’s the last Sunday before Thanksgiving, though we’ll still have one more weekend before December arrives. It’s crazy to think that this year is almost over, and that Christmas is just around the corner. The goose is getting fat and all that jazz.

If you’re looking for help with today’s NYT Connections, you’ve come to the right place. Below, you’ll find some extra hints to help you guess the Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple groups, as well as the categories and, finally, the answers.

Be sure to also check out my latest weekend streaming guide to for all the best new shows and movies out this weekend. There’s some great new TV shows and movies to entertain you on these chilly November nights.

Okay, 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 23

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:

• DEN
• LOOSE
• GIMME
• LAX
• BURROW
• MIA
• WARREN
• PLATOON
• TROUPER
• WALL STREET
• EASY
• JFK
• SLACK
• NIXON
• LODGE
• QUEEN

Hints for the Connections groups today are:

• 🟡Yellow group – Not very strict.
• 🔵Blue group – Also Natural Born Killers, The Doors, etc.
• 🟢Green group – Furry friend abodes.
• 🟣Purple group – Found in song titles.

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

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

• 🟡Yellow group – Lenient
• 🔵Blue group – Oliver Stone Movies
• 🟢Green group – Animal Homes
• 🟣Purple group – Second words in titles of ABBA hits

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 – Easy, Lax, Loose, Slack
• 🔵Blue group – JFK, Nixon, Platoon, Wall Street
• 🟢Green group – Burrow, Den, Lodge, Warren
• 🟣Purple group – Gimme, MIA, Queen, Trouper

The Blue Group was incredibly obvious to me, though I write about movies so it would be kind of embarrassing if I didn’t immediately pick up that these were all Oliver Stone films. The red herring here was WARREN, since WARREN could invoke Warren G. Harding, a predecessor of JFK and NIXON. But there’s not a fourth president, only a QUEEN, so that clearly didn’t fit.

Animal homes was pretty obvious once the Blue Group was out of the way, and I quickly gathered BURROW, DEN and LODGE to go with WARREN. With the Green Group done, it was even more obvious that EASY, LAX, LOOSE and SLACK must be the yellow group – all words to do with leniency.

This left the Purple Group and I still didn’t know what the connection was when I plugged these words in. Turns out they’re all ABBA songs, or the second word of ABBA songs, such as Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! and Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen and Super Trouper (that last one is a big hint for ABBA fans, but as much as I do like ABBA I’ve never really been a superfan).

We’ll exit with another of the Swedish band’s songs:

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.