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Today's puzzle pretends to like baseball, but don't let that trap strike you out.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 9 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
- Puff
- Episode
- Tie
- Shoelaces
- Period
- Chain
- Season
- Think
- Lanyard
- Friendship Bracelet
- Conversation
- Series
- Quipu
- Boa
- Franchise
- Macrame
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: Units of TV programs
- 🟩 Green: Things worn around the neck
- 🟦 Blue: Strings tied in knots
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Piece
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 9 for puzzle #1,063 are a tad harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Units of programs: Episode, franchise, season, series
- 🟩 Things worn around the neck: Boa, chain, lanyard, tie
- 🟦 Strings tied in knots: Friendship bracelet, macrame, quipu, shoelaces
- 🟪 ____ Piece: Conversation, period, puff, think
I relearned something today which I always find to be fun. More on that in a moment.
To kick things off I took lanyard, boa, tie and chain as necklaces right off because I saw the set first.
With the green out of the way, period piece came to mind, which is how I got to think piece, puff piece and conversation piece. Helpfully, three of the four were in the first row when the grid reset.
I took the yellow franchise set of episode, franchise, season and series next because I wasn't entirely confident in what the blue set was going for.
I had clocked macrame, friendship bracelet and macrame as stringed things early on but I try not to look things up as I'm solving. Largely this is because often the tricky words or words I don't know might be a "misspelling" or used in a different manner.
Anyway, the point is I had forgetten what a quipu is. So it was nice to look it up after the solve and be reminded that at it's simplest, the quipu was a way of record keeping for Incans precolonization.
My understanding is that while we know they were used as a medium for data tracking, it's not yet clear how to read a quipu. Fascinating stuff.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Canoodling: First base, making out, necking, tonsil hockey
- 🟩 Five-sided things: Home plate, jeans back pocket, school crossing sign, the pentagon
- 🟦 Unexpected places to be "out of": Left field, nowhere, the blue, thin air
- 🟪 Ending in candy brands in "S": Burger king whooper, film nerd, memento, pitcher's mound
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,062, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
I missed the reverse rainbow yesterday but managed to make up for it today.
Initially, I saw the baseball set (first base, home plate, left field and pitcher's mound) and was about to put it in when I spotted making out, which meant first base had another purpose.
Reviewing the baseball set, I spotted mound(s) and then burger king whopper(s). That led me to film nerd(s) and memento(s).
I immediately thought "out of left field" when I focused on that word. This got me to out of thin air and then of out of the blue and finally out out of nowhere.
The Pentagon and Home Plate got me to the five-side. I actually had to look at my jeans to see if the pocket was five-sided and then school crossing sign.
Finally, we returned to canoodling with first base, making out, necking and tonsil hockey.
