Beat Today's NYT Connections With Hints And Answers For Friday, May 23

Forbes

22-05-2025

Each day's game of NYT Connections goes live at midnight local time. As such, 'today's Connections hints and answers' depend on where you are in the world. In case you need them, here are the Connections hints and answers for Thursday:
Hey there, Connectors! The weekend is right around the corner. I hope you make it a memorable one!
I read something recently that's really stuck with me. Jamie Cattanach spent years as a traveling writer with no fixed abode, but was ready to put down roots after turning 30. However, after Cattanach found a place to call home in Portland, Oregon, a 'sudden homebody-ism' took hold.
"As a younger adult, I'd always thought the comfort of the familiar was a poor substitute for the excitement of the novel — that seeking out familiarity was necessarily a sacrifice, often based in fear or ignorance," Cattanach wrote in a guest essay for Wild Writing (go read it!). "But now I see that one lifetime can have enough room for both. I'm so grateful for the time I spent all over the place. It did give me fuel to tell more powerful stories in a richer and better-informed context. It was also just plain fun."
I absolutely relate to this. I'm a homebody by nature. I can easily spend a few days without going outside (especially in winter!). But lived experiences are always where the best stories come from.
Writers are often told, particularly when it comes to fiction, 'write what you know.' But they'll quickly run out of things to write about if they don't live life fully enough or experience much outside of their bubble. The same goes for having stories worth telling. I have to remind myself of that more often than I'd like to admit.
(I wrote about a similar subject in my newsletter this week!)
Before we begin, we have a great little community on Discord, where we chat about NYT Connections, the rest of the NYT games and all kinds of other stuff. Everyone who has joined has been lovely. It's a fun hangout spot, and you're more than welcome to hang out with us.
Discord is also the best way to give me any feedback about the column, especially on the rare (or not-so-rare) occasions that I mess something up. I don't look at the comments or Twitter much.
Today's NYT Connections hints and answers for Friday, May 23 are coming right up.
Connections is a free New York Times daily word game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day. You can play on the NYT's website or Games app.
You're presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.
There's only one solution for each puzzle, and you'll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.
Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.
Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you're incorrect, you'll lose a life. If you're close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you're one word away from getting it right, but you'll still need to figure out which one to swap.
If you make four mistakes, it's game over. Let's make sure that doesn't happen with the help of some hints, and, if you're really struggling, today's Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it's easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.
If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the publication's Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.
Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.
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Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase
Pinpoint By Linkedin
Guess The Category
Queens By Linkedin
Crown Each Region
Crossclimb By Linkedin
Unlock A Trivia Ladder
Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today's Connections groups, I'll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.
Today's 16 words are...
And the hints for today's Connections groups are:
Need some extra help?
Be warned: we're starting to get into spoiler territory.
Today's Connections groups are...
Spoiler alert! Don't scroll any further down the page until you're ready to find out today's Connections answers.
This is your final warning!
Today's Connections answers are...
That's win number 87 in a row with a perfect game to match. Here's how I fared:
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
POUND, OUNCE and STONE naturally fit together, but I felt like we'd had a similar group relatively recently? Still, a DRAM is a unit of measurement (equal to an eighth of a fluid ounce, or whatever I decide is a dram of whisky when I'm pouring). So I clumped those together and had the blues.
BLOWOUT, MAKEUP and EYELINER seemed like a red herring to me, so I steered clear of that. I did soon realize that MAKEUP should go with CHARACTER, FIBER (as in moral fiber?) and NATURE. That got me the greens.
The yellows seemed very clear at that point – they're all words that refer to a particularly enjoyable party. But, as ever, I submitted the purples first. No idea about the connection there, either before or after submitting it. I'd never heard of "cat's eye" in any of these contexts.
The only thing I had in mind was the end of Men in Black, where aliens are playing with marbles that contain entire galaxies. That could have brought together MARBLE and NEBULA. GLASSES could have worked with those two with the whole shades and memory-erasing device thing. Anyway, as clueless as I was about the purples, I'll take that win.
That's all there is to it for today's Connections clues and answers. I'll be back with you all here on Monday. In the meantime, you can check out my weekend editions of this column in my newsletter, Pastimes.
P.S. I find it hard to listen to most music while I'm working. Lyrics that I understand mess with my language-processing capabilities when I'm trying to write. So if I do have music on while I'm working, it's usually something instrumental (or sung in a language I don't understand).
One of my favorite games of 2023 was Lone Ruin, an action-packed, magic-based roguelike (though a fairly condensed one). The propulsive, synth-heavy soundtrack by Alfred Rahm is something I sometimes turn to when I'm in get-stuff-done mode.
This won't be for everyone, but it often works for me. The second track, 'Break,' is my favorite of the bunch:
P.P.S. The imperial measurement system makes no sense and the metric system is the one that we should all be using. I rest my case.
Have a great day! Stay hydrated! Call someone you love!
Please follow my blog for more coverage of NYT Connections and other word games, and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me out a lot! Sharing this column with other people who play Connections would be appreciated too. You can also read my weekend editions of this column at my newsletter, Pastimes.