NYT Connections today hints and answers — Sunday, August 25 (#441)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on August 25 for puzzle #441 are slightly more difficult than yesterday’s answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 2.6 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, #440, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #441. 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: Hopping mad
• 🟩 Green: Status
• 🟦 Blue: Words that make up the acronym “HVAC”
• 🟪 Purple: Activities that involve folding

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: Keep cool and don’t blow your top with today’s puzzle, even if a fair bit of wordplay has you bending over backward to make connections. 

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #441?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Hopping mad: Boiling, fuming, livid, steaming
• 🟩 Status: Position, ranking, standing, station
• 🟦 Words that make up the acronym “HVAC”: Air, conditioning, heating, ventilation
• 🟪 Activities that involve folding: Baking, laundry, origami, poker

I kicked off today’s puzzle with the yellow category, but not after striking out once on the blue one. Once I realized Heating had nothing to do with Boiling or Fuming, I started thinking maybe I shouldn’t be taking some of these clues so literally. Once I started brainstorming some of the other hyperbolic words we use to describe anger, Livid and Steaming popped out. 

Next came the blue category, which was easy now that I knew Heating was the outlier from all these red-hot clues. 

After that came the purple category. I got Baking, Laundry, and Origami fairly quickly, but struggled for the fourth for a while until I remembered folding had a less literal meaning in Poker. 

Green became a rote fill after that. 

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #440, which had a difficulty rating of 2.4 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

Finally! After a week where I struggled with puzzles rated 2 difficulty and destroying rated 3 puzzles, yesterday’s was a 2 and it was smooth sailing. You gotta take the wins when you can get them.

Anywho, I started today with the yellow category as I saw rumbling and whispers first followed by speculation and talk. This was after a momentary look at piecing together something talk, latin and jargon but I skipped that idea.

I was in the middle of putting together a cheap connection with budget, steal and thrifty when it suddenly clicked that with enterprise and national I was looking at car rental companies. Sometimes your brain surprises you.

Today’s green category could have easily been a yellow, but creep, slip, steal, and tiptoe are all stealthy moves.

Personally, I rarely make the delete a letter or portion of the word to find another connection. So, it’s always a relief that I don’t take strikes trying to shove bad connections into other groupings. 

Today’s purple are chemical elements: Env(Iron), J(Argon), La(Tin), and P(Lead).