NYT Connections today hints and answers — Monday, September 16 (#463)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 16 for puzzle #463 are a little harder than yesterday’s answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3.2 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, #462, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #463. 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: Foremost
• 🟩 Green: Spiky things
• 🟦 Blue: Overly sentimental work
• 🟪 Purple: Things that are capped

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:  As the weekend winds down, don’t be a dunce: be sure to relax and unwind wherever you are, and maybe think of a lucky number while you’re at it. 

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #463?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Foremost: Chief, premier, principal, supreme
• 🟩 Spiky things: Cactus, hedgehog, mace, pineapple
• 🟦 Overly sentimental work: Cheese, corn, mush, pap
• 🟪 Things that are capped: Bottle, graduate, mushroom, salary

I struck out first with a guess for “unconventional toppings on pizza” with all of today’s food-related clues, but quickly recovered by knocking out the yellow category with Chief, Premier, Principal, Supreme. Of course, with the easiest connection out of the way, that always means the pressure is on for the rest of the categories.

Next was blue, which involved a bit of blind luck for me considering I’ve never heard Pap used in that context before and tried grouping it in with the others on a lark. Calling sentimental stories Cheese(y), Corn(y), Mush(y), I was familiar with, but Pap? Turns out it means “worthless or trivial reading matter or entertainment.” What do y’know, you learn something new every day. 

After that, I breezed through the green category (Cactus, Hedgehog, Mace, Pineapple), since the connection became clear with only eight clues left. Plus I saw the trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 over the weekend so the little rodents have been running around my mind. 

Finally the purple category (Bottle, Graduate, Mushroom, Salary) had me stumped until the connection was revealed. I always fumble the wordplay categories, and this one was no different, but I do appreciate how clever the Connections Team gets with them.

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #462, which had a difficulty rating of 2.9 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

Unsurprisingly, the two easier categories were a breeze to solve yesterday. I started with green, nabbing Decline, Drop, Dwindle, and Ebb pretty quickly since the latter especially don’t really have any other meanings besides “decrease.” 

Next came the yellow category, another easy fill with Dwell, Inhabit, Stay, and Live.

Blue was a little harder to wrap my head around, because while I singled out Clown, Dweeb, and Turkey fairly quickly, the fourth eluded me until I remember Sap was one half of “sad sap” and not just the word for what comes out of a maple tree. 

That made purple a rode fill today, which worked out great since I’d never heard the word “septet” before. Even after looking it up, it took another second for the theme to click for me: Seven Dwarfs, seven Seas, seven Sins, seven Wonders of the world.