Today’s NYT ‘Connections’ Hints And Answers For Saturday, November 9

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

Hey, everyone. Welcome to perhaps the most needed weekend in recent memory. Whatever you’re planning to get up to, I hope you make the most of it.

Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Saturday, November 9, 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.

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.

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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...

• THRONE
• SHRED
• GNARLY
• POWDER
• RADICAL
• BATH
• LICK
• POWER
• TWISTED
• ROOT
• REST
• BENT
• TRACE
• WARPED
• EXPONENT
• OUNCE

And the hints for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group — misshapen, perhaps
• Green group — lil' bit
• Blue group — all part of the equation
• Purple group — don't flush away your chances of a win

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 — contorted
• Green group — smallest amount
• Blue group — algebra terms
• Purple group — words before "room" to mean lavatory

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 — contorted (BENT, GNARLY, TWISTED, WARPED)
• Green group — smallest amount (LICK, OUNCE, SHRED, TRACE)
• Blue group — algebra terms (EXPONENT, POWER, RADICAL, ROOT)
• Purple group — words before "room" to mean lavatory (BATH, POWDER, REST, THRONE)

A perfect game was practically a (half-) pipe dream today. I barely kept my streak alive, but I managed to extend it to 13 wins. Here's how I fared:

🟩🟨🟪🟦

🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟨🟦🟨🟨

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟪🟪🟦🟦

🟪🟪🟪🟪

🟦🟦🟦🟦

I wasn't seeing anything right away, so I made a guess I was pretty sure was going to be incorrect — SHRED, GNARLY, POWDER and RADICAL, as in snowboarding-related terms. Sure enough, no dice.

After a break, I looked at the grid again and drew a line in my mind between SHRED and LICK. That led me to the greens. The yellows were next, but only after I mistakenly included RADICAL instead of BENT.

I didn't really know where to go from there. I tried a random guess, but no joy.

At the death, though, I had the luckiest save I think I've ever had. I thought BATH, POWDER and REST made sense together, but I figured that they all came after "foot" (foot bath, footrest etc.). Of the remaining words, THRONE made the most sense. I assumed that was maybe another word for a footstool. But nope!

That left the blues, for which I did not deduce the connection, for an unexpected win. Phew!

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 Sunday’s game if you need them.

P.S. I've mentioned in passing that I was thinking about getting a rowing machine and I recently decided to take the plunge on a Concept2 RowErg, the option that pretty much everyone recommends. It's taking up a lot of space in my relatively small apartment and it's fairly expensive. But with my building's pool closed until probably May, I needed a way to work out that I didn't hate and my gym doesn't have a rower.

In terms of offering a recommendation, I'd suggest finding a way to stay active that works for you.

I enjoyed using rowing machines when I was younger, so I hope this will do the job for me as a low-impact, full body workout. Even better, I can catch up on shows and movies while I'm slowly getting in shape.

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!