NYT Connections today hints and answers — Wednesday, October 23 (#500)

NYTimes Connections
(Image credit: Future)

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 23 for puzzle #500 are slightly harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.8 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, #499, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #500. 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: Yellow ____
  • 🟩 Green: Green ____
  • 🟦 Blue: Blue ____
  • 🟪 Purple: Purple ____

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: Colors, color, colors. Add a yellow, green, blue or purple before each word and you'll find the way.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #500?

Drumroll, please...

  • 🟨 Yellow ____: Cab, jacket, journalism, pages
  • 🟩 Green ____: Beret, goblin, salad, thumb
  • 🟦 Blue ____: Jay, jeans, moon, whale
  • 🟪 Purple ____: Haze, heart, prose, rain

Welcome to puzzle #500 for Connections. It's not been around as long as some, Wordle is well in to the 1200s, but it's still impressive to get here.

So, how did the Connections Crew treat us for getting to number 500?They got cute and clever.

I believe that some people will see this puzzle and be done with it as fast as they can tap the words. For others, it will be a struggle until something clicks for you.

I found myself in the latter camp staring blankly at the puzzle until, for unknown reasons, green beret came to mind and suddenly I was off to the races. From there we had Green Goblin (for me, of Spiderman fame), green salad and green thumb.

After that, we went to yellow for yellow cab, yellow jacket, yellow journalism (most headlines these days), and yellow pages, which still exists.

It was coinflip here but I saw Purple Haze first and followed up with purple prose, Purple Rain and purple heart. With two song references (Jimi Hendrix's Haze and Prince's Rain), I can see why this was considered the harder of the last two groupings. Though, they are fairly famous singles.

Finally, we wrapped it up with blue jay, blue jeans, blue moon and blue whale.

Like I said, a very cute puzzle that was an enjoyable solve once it clicked.

Here's to 500 more.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #498, which had a difficulty rating of 2.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

I believe I've mentioned before but it is always satisfying to go down the line in order either yellow to purple or in reverse. Today, we went easy to hard.

To kick things off, the yellow category was looking for designer, haute, high-end and luxury which was labeled "brand-name". I think that's the wrong title but the grouping makes sense together.

From there we put together green having seen engineer and hatch. Concoct and mastermind were quick grabs from there.

I recalled Viking, Voyager and Pioneer but totally forgot about Galileo, which was launched by NASA to study Jupiter and it's moons.

It was a coin flip between purple and blue but I was trying to go down the line.

So, I was surprised that purple was the games and not the spacecraft. Still, they are all games where you say their name as you play; bingo, Marco Polo, tag, and Uno.

Scott Younker
West Coast Reporter

Scott Younker is the West Coast Reporter at Tom’s Guide. He covers all the lastest tech news. He’s been involved in tech since 2011 at various outlets and is on an ongoing hunt to build the easiest to use home media system. When not writing about the latest devices, you are more than welcome to discuss board games or disc golf with him.