Today's puzzle isn't tricky but it's not normal.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for September 4 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,181. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,180, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
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
- Moon
- Eye
- Pizza Pie
- That's
- Moray
- Candy Corn
- Orange
- Opine
- Bowling Ball
- Ribbon
- Cake Donut
- Conger
- Cherry Tomato
- Stied
- Gulper
- Cringy
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Round
- 🟩 Green: Double edibles
- 🟦 Blue: Long fish
- 🟪 Purple: Inside wearables
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: Spherical Things
- 🟩 Green: Food Whose Name Is Two Foods
- 🟦 Blue: Kinds of Eels
- 🟪 Purple: Accessories Inside Starting and Ending Letters
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 September 4 for puzzle #1,181 are easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.5 out of 5.
- 🟨 Spherical Things: Bowling Ball, Eye, Moon, Orange
- 🟩 Food Whose Name Is Two Foods: Cake Donut, Candy Corn, Cherry Tomato, Pizza Pie
- 🟦 Kinds of Eels: Conger, Gulper, Moray, Ribbon
- 🟪 Accessories Inside Starting and Ending Letters: Cringy, Opine, Stied, That's
Today's puzzle rating seems off from Connections Companion, because I found this to be the hardest Connections I've ever done (granted, I only cover for Scott or Alyse when they're off).
It seems easy for the yellow words, then it ramps up for green and rocks your brain on blue and purple (especially purple; I could barely come up with a hint for it).
As you can probably tell from my tone, I didn't solve today's puzzle successfully, and I'm not happy about it. Maybe I just need to expand my knowledge of eels so I can get blue, but there's no way I'd ever figure out the Accessories Inside Starting and Ending Letters without the process of elimination.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Two shakes of a lamb's tail: Blink, flash, heartbeat, trice
- 🟩 Shades of red: Carmine, cinnabar, maroon, vermilion
- 🟦 Toy car brands: Hot wheels, matchbox, micro machines, tonka
- 🟪 Spreadsheet functions: Average, count, max, sum
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,180, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
I found today's puzzle confusing, mostly because it didn't seem to follow any normal patterns, especially for the purple set.
I started with the toys in Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Micro Machines and Tonka, mostly because I currently play with those brands with my son. I was surprised to see that it was the blue set and not green or yellow.
I had spotted the spreadsheet functions, though I was thinking of them as math terms, not just spreadsheet tools and mentally put it in the green or yellow set.
With that in mind, I put in the colors of carmine, cinnabar, maroon and vermilion and was again surprised they were green.
Between the last two sets, I had no idea which was which. I put in trice, heartbeat, flash and blink because I thought trice would be a word that some people wouldn't know. Alas, it was yellow.
So, this left average, count, max and sum as the purple set. It's unusual even for a 2-rated puzzle. Generally, either the words connect in a unique way or require addition, subtraction or some other finnickery to make a connection. In any other Connections puzzle, this would probably be a yellow or green set. Odd.
