Looking for clues for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on May 9 for puzzle #698 take a steep dive in difficulty compared to yesterday’s puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 2.7 out of 5.
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.
Plus, we’re including a reflection on yesterday’s puzzle, #697, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #698. 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.
Today’s Connections words are: Dim, Sum, Product, Shade, Color, Drape, Remote, Difference, Contrast, Faint, Shutter, Tint, Quotient, Blind, Brightness, and Vague.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: TV display settings
- 🟩 Green: Fuzzy, as a memory
- 🟦 Blue: Results of some arithmetic
- 🟪 Purple: Window treatments in the singular
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: Close that window, adjust your TV, and do some fuzzy math.
Today’s Connections answers
So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #698?
Drumroll, please…
- 🟨 TV display settings: Brightness, color, contrast, tint
- 🟩 Fuzzy, as a memory: Dim, faint, remote, vague
- 🟦 Results of some arithmetic: Difference, product, quotient, sum
- 🟪 Window treatments in the singular: Blind, drape, shade, shutter
I’ve mentioned this before but some of the challenge in the “easier” (those under rated under 3) puzzles is in guessing what the maker thinks is easy versus hard, where the harder puzzles its actually seeing the Connections.
I was stuck between a math problem and a window.
So, my guess as to the purple today was blind, drape, shade and shutter as window treatments, because they were missing their plural S.
From there, the blue category’s math words of sum, quotient, difference and product stuck out to me.
I had assumed early on that the brightness, color, contrast and tint were TV related but wasn’t sure if it was green or yellow. So I put it in thinking it was green, alas it was yellow.
Thus we ended on green’s dim, faint, remote and vague as fuzzy memories, which seems more like a yellow level category than a green compared to TV settings, but that’s just my opinion.
Yesterday’s Connections answers
- 🟨 Commit to paper: Author, compose, pen, write
- 🟩 Needs for playing Yahtzee: Cup, dice, pencil, scoreboard
- 🟦 Heroes of action movie franchises: Bond, Jones, Ocean, Wick
- 🟪 ____ Stick: Candle, chop, joy, yard
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #697, which had a difficulty rating of 4 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Apparently, I was in a Yahtzee mood as I saw dice and pencil and immediately thought of Yahtzee. Scoreboard and cup were easy finds from there.
I saw the yellow group next having spotted compose and pen. Write and author were obvious from there. However, assuming this was the yellow group, I saved it for later, unless I got stuck.
Fortunately, I had seen (James) Bond and (John) Wick earlier. (Danny) Ocean stuck out next. I had seen Jones but for the life of me could not remember what action movie they went with, unforgiveably forgetting Indiana. Though, I would quibble that Danny Ocean isn’t a hero from an action movie.
Anyway, with those out of the way, I was able to grab candle stick, chop stick, joy stick and yard stick as my second group.
Then I quickly entered in the blue and then yellow quartets to wrap things up.
