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Today's puzzle is a bit tricky and relies on a couple regionalisms that might flummox some.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 21 below.
What is Connections
Solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Today's Connection Grid and Words
- Love
- Chess
- Honey
- Moon
- Peach
- Hot
- Yellow
- Pumpkin
- Advantage
- Can
- Pecan
- Colonel
- Deuce
- Shoofly
- Caboose
- Forty
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Dessert
- 🟩 Green: Booty call
- 🟦 Blue: Jannik
- 🟪 Purple: Easy color
Today's Connections Group Hints
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Kinds of pies
- 🟩 Green: Things associated with butts
- 🟦 Blue: Tennis scoring terms
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Mustard
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Today's Connections answers
The Connections answers on May 21 for puzzle #1,075 are harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Stove knob settings: High, medium, off, simmer
- 🟩 Potency: Concentration, force, intensity, might
- 🟦 Music theory concepts: Interval, key, mode, scale
- 🟪 "____ Day" movies: Groundhog, independence, the longest, training
I ended up going hard, easy in a pattern today.
My first go I was looking for colors between yellow, pumpkin and honey. But that is how I clicked on mustard with yellow and honey. I nabbed hot but it did take a moment for Colonel mostly because I was looking for food.
Next, I spotted the pies with Chess. That got me to pecan, pumpkin, peach and strike. Fortunately, my terrible sweet tooth saved me because I was aware of the shoofly pie, though this is such a regionalism that I'm not sure if it should count as a yellow. Luckily, without looking elsewhere, I just swapped out peach for shoofly which worked.
With the final eight, I was able to see the tennis words. Quickly snagged advantage, deuce, forty and love.
Which left the booty slang in caboose, can, moon and peach.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Stove knob settings: High, medium, off, simmer
- 🟩 Potency: Concentration, force, intensity, might
- 🟦 Music theory concepts: Interval, key, mode, scale
- 🟪 "____ Day" movies: Groundhog, independence, the longest, training
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,074, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5.
I ended up going reverse rainbow today. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I solve Connections on something of a vibes basis, where I take the sets as they come to me, so reverse rainbows are always a pleasant surprise.
So, I saw The Longest and immediately thought of the The Longest Yard movie, take your pick the Burt Reynolds or Adam Sandler one. The Longest Day is not that. I was initially looking for Yards before I saw Training and found Training Day. That led me to Groundhog and Independence before I switched The Longest.
Maybe its the crosswordese but I locked into the musicl theory words next with key and mode. Scale and interval were quick finds from there.
It did take a moment with the final 8 for potency to click in concentration, force, intensity and might. Though I'm not sure what I was looking for since the cooking words were obvious.
That included high, medium, off and simmer.
