Today’s NYT ‘Connections’ Hints And Answers For Friday, November 15 (#523)

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

Hey, there! Happy Friday. We’re almost at the end of the week, and I’m glad to be taking a little break. I truly love what I do for a living, but I’m very much looking forward to some real time off over the holidays to refresh, recharge and catch up with loved ones.

I’m likely going to be spending less time on Twitter, outside of newsgathering, DMs and grabbing tweets to embed in stories. However, I’m tempted to keep posting but in the most banal way possible, like many of us did in the mid-2000s. So I hope my followers are ready to learn what I’m having for breakfast and when I go for a walk. I might set up one of those automated responses to thank any new followers, so the bots that start following me have something to look forward to as well.

I’ll be on Bluesky and Threads, but probably more active on the former, at least until I can set up a desktop app that lets me post to those platforms (and Mastodon) at the same time. (There’s a mobile app that does the trick.) Email is always a good bet if you want to get in touch as well.

Anyway, today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Friday, November 15, are coming right up.

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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.

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...

• PIPE
• PHRASE
• JUG
• PASSAGE
• LEAK
• LETTER
• WASTE
• WHISTLE
• NICK
• CRACK
• RECORDER
• WORD
• HOLE
• SANDS
• SENTENCE
• PUNCTURE

And the hints for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group — fracture
• Green group — components that you're looking at right now
• Blue group — forcefully emit a breath and make noise with these
• Purple group — they relate to perhaps the only thing you can't truly buy more of

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Need some extra help?

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

Today’s groups are...

• Yellow group — fissure
• Green group — elements of writing
• Blue group — instruments you blow into
• Purple group — ____ of time

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 — fissure (CRACK, HOLE, LEAK, PUNCTURE)
• Green group — elements of writing (LETTER, PHRASE, SENTENCE, WORD)
• Blue group — instruments you blow into (JUG, PIPE, RECORDER, WHISTLE)
• Purple group — ____ of time (NICK, PASSAGE, SANDS, WASTE)

Two straight perfect games and four wins in a row. Can't argue with that. Here's how I fared:

🟦🟦🟦🟦

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟪🟪🟪🟪

🟩🟩🟩🟩

Quite the intriguing grid today. There were a couple of possible groups that each had five candidates:

• PHRASE, PASSAGE, LETTER, WORD and SENTENCE
• LEAK, NICK, CRACK, HOLE and PUNCTURE

Naturally, I tried to eliminate a couple of those words by looking elsewhere first. The blues were straightforward enough (even if my clue was a little inelegant — sorry!), and that left me with SANDS and WASTE as the two outliers, perse. NICK was gnawing at me, though, so I shunted that aside and gambled to get the yellows.

Of the language-related words, PASSAGE seemed like the odd one out. So I paired those with NICK, SANDS and WASTE to get the purples, which I probably should have figured out. I wrapped things up with the greens.

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 Saturday’s game if you need them.

P.S. I just finished bingeing all of Abbott Elementary (at least up to the most recent episode) and what a fine show that is. It's by and large wholesome, sweet and positive, and it's a pretty great tonic if you need a pick-me-up. No spoilers, but I absolutely loved Ava's Halloween costume from a recent episode.

I'm trying to figure out what I should watch next. I may go back to House of the Dragon after checking out the first two episodes recently, but if you have any suggestions, I guess you know where to find me!

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!