Today’s NYT ‘Connections’ Hints And Answers For Sunday, November 17

Looking for Saturday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:

Hey there, folks! I hope you’re making the most of the weekend. I’m in a very good mood after the Scotland men’s football (not soccer) team notched their first competitive win in over a year, and it was over a very good team in Croatia. We’ve been playing well recently without the results to show for it, so I’m hoping we’re turning the corner.

Without getting into the details, we’re suddenly in a position to secure a spot that will give us a much better chance of qualifying for the next World Cup. Fingers crossed for a big win over Poland on Monday!

Anyway, today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, November 17, are coming right up.

How To Play Connections

Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day. You can play on the NYT website or Games app.

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You’re presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.

There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.

Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.

Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.

If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.

If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.

Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints for each grid via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.

Today’s 16 words are...

• APOLOGY
• QUOTATION
• ASSOCIATION
• CONTRACTION
• CLINGY
• UNION
• POSSESSIVE
• SLINKY
• PROPOSAL
• SNUG
• PRAYER
• LEAGUE
• GUILD
• DUBBING
• FOOT
• SLEEK

And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:

• Yellow group — groups of people with a common goal
• Green group — tight
• Blue group — reasons to drop down
• Purple group — use cases for a versatile mark

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Need some extra help?

Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.

Today’s Connections groups are...

• Yellow group — alliance
• Green group — close-fitting
• Blue group — occasions when one might kneel
• Purple group — what an apostrophe might mean

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections answers.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections answers are...

• Yellow group — alliance (ASSOCIATION, GUILD, LEAGUE, UNION)
• Green group — close-fitting (CLINGY, SLEEK, SLINKY, SNUG)
• Blue group — occasions when one might kneel (APOLOGY, DUBBING, PRAYER, PROPOSAL)
• Purple group — what an apostrophe might mean (CONTRACTION, FOOT, POSSESSIVE, QUOTATION)

No perfect game, but I’m back to winning ways. Here's how I fared today:

🟪🟪🟪🟪

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟦🟦🟩🟦

🟦🟩🟦🟦

🟦🟦🟦🟦

🟩🟩🟩🟩

I got the purples almost immediately. Given what I do for a living, it would have been pretty embarrassing if I hadn't. But I totally understand why this might be a troublesome group for some folks.

The yellows were straightforward, but then I had a little difficulty with the greens and blues. I figured that PROPOSAL, APOLOGY and PRAYER were all things that you do with hands touching each other, but I wasn't sure about the fourth word. I was one away from a group with SNUG and then CLINGY in the mix.

DUBBING proved to be the missing link. I was way off with my thought process but, hey, I got there in the end. I was also thinking of DUBBING in terms of recording over existing audio.

I didn't figure out the green connection either, because I was thinking of SLINKY as the toy. But I'll take the win.

That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Monday’s game if you need them.

P.S. For a while now, I've sometimes turned to what I've referred to as my main playlist when I don't have a particular recommendation in mind. So, I figured, why not share that playlist?

It's called Mega Fun (for no real reason). I've been working on it for the last year, just adding songs when I think of them. There's no real theme other than that they're mostly upbeat songs I like that are fun to listen, dance and/or sing along to. I listen to it on shuffle every day and it wakes me up in the morning. There are currently 898 tracks on the playlist spanning all kinds of genres, and the current playtime is around 57 hours (sorry, not sorry).

For now, you'll only be able to listen if you're an Apple Music subscriber, but I think there's a way to export the data so it can be used on the likes of Spotify and YouTube Music as well. So let me know if you’re interested in snagging a copy and I’ll look into that.

In the meantime, here’s the first song on the list and the one that inspired me to start throwing it together. I’ve recommended this before but it’s such a fun and underappreciated pop tune:

If you’re so inclined, please do follow my blog for more coverage of Connections and other word games and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me out a lot!