Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 8 for puzzle #485 are a smidge easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #484, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #485. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, 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.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Halloween symbols
- 🟩 Green: Prohibit
- 🟦 Blue: Found on sheet music
- 🟪 Purple: Candy ____
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.
Here's a larger hint: Get Halloween on the mind before reading some music.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #485?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Halloween symbols: Bat, pumpkin, spider, witch
- 🟩 Prohibit: Ban, block, deny, forbid
- 🟦 Found on sheet music: Accidental, note, rest, staff
- 🟪 Candy _____: Apple, bar, cane, corn
Of course, Halloween is on the mind, so today was got off to a cute start with bat, pumpkin, spider and witch for the yellow group.
I purposely tried to go down the line and ban, block, deny and forbid stuck out as about as easy as the yellow category. Though I did take a strike trying bar.
From here I got a little stuck because I don't read music and had no idea that accidental is apparently a symbol or type of symbol you can see on sheet music. So, I wasn't sure where it fit and assumed it was purple.
Which led me to the Purple category and candy apple, candy bar, candy cane and candy corn.
Blue for music was accidental, note, rest and staff. Learned something but I'm not sure it'll be top of mind on future sheet music clues.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #484, which had a difficulty rating of 3.2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Today's clues looked like alphabet soup at first, which is why Alyse was surprised to get the purple category out of the way first. She rewatched "Nope" the other day, so terrifying famous primates were already on her mind, making it easy to scoop up Bubbles, Koko, King Kong, and George (though she did stare blankly at that last one for a full minute before remembering that "Curious" is an adjective and not his first name.
After that came the yellow category with Ding-Dong, Dodo, Yahoo, and Yo-Yo. Alyse struck out on her first guess, thinking that the category was names to call someone who is acting silly, which Hoot would qualify under.
Next was the blue category with Beep Beep, Purr, Skrrt, and Vroom, where she misstepped again because she forgot Skrrt was an onomatopoeia before it was a slang term.
And so the blue category became today's rote fill with Har-har, Hoot, Whoop, and Yuk.
