NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, October 3 (#480)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 3 for puzzle #480 are significantly easier than yesterday’s puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3.7 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today’s answers. 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, #479, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #480. 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: Beverages
• 🟩 Green: Care for a plant
• 🟦 Blue: Item sold in pairs
• 🟪 Purple: Bugs plus starting letter

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: Grab a drink before giving your plants some love. After that pair up some items and lose the first letter to find the insect.

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #480?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Beverages: Juice, milk, punch, soda
• 🟩 Care for a plant: Fertilize, pot, prune, water
• 🟦 Item sold in pairs: Bookend, earbud, ski, sock
• 🟪 Bugs plus starting letter: Blouse, pant, smite, stick

Back over three again after a brief hiatus down into the twos. 

Surprisingly, today felt about as easy as yesterday as we went down the line with the latest quartet of categories.

To get things started we nabbed the yellow group with the beverages juice, milk, punch, soda. 

After that we took care of plants with fertilize, pot, prune, water. 

As usual, I find great dislike in the take a letter away categories so was stuck for a bit until I considered skis and socks as pairs. Earbud and bookend were picked up after a pant strike. 

From there we were able to do the rote fill in with the purple bugs minus the first letter. Which got us (B)louse, (P)ant, (S)mite, and (S)tick.

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #478, which had a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

After nearly a week of puzzles over 3.5 difficulty with at least 3 over 4.0, today was a come down with the difficulty listed at 2.8.

And we felt it as we were able to slice through today’s puzzle pretty quickly.

I saw Octopus and Shiva right away and was looking for other multi-armed options so actually went with Joker and forced Venus De Milo for my first strike. A review saw slot machine so I swapped that out for the purple category.

I was in a Casino mindset and saw chance and gamble. Bet and risk were pretty quick finds to fill in the yellow group.

Green was an easy fill with julienne, slice, dice and cube. 

I forgot De Niro was in the Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie, but also never bothered to watch that one otherwise I think I would have had this group earlier with Casino, Taxi Driver and Heat. So it goes.

I forgot to mention it yesterday but happy spooky season for those who love the real beginning of Halloween season and not September (or ugh, July) like some desperate goths want it to be.