NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, September 5 (#452)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 5 for puzzle #452 jumps back up difficulty compared to yesterday’s answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3.1 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, #451, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #452. 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: Hair salon offerings
• 🟩 Green: Criticize
• 🟦 Blue: Obtain
• 🟪 Purple: Measured in football stats

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: It is football season but start with a hair cut hopefully avoiding derision and then getting that bag.

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #452?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Hair salon offerings: Blowout, color, cut trim
• 🟩 Criticize: Bash, blast, pan, slam
• 🟦 Obtain: Bag, land, score, snag
• 🟪 Measured in football stats: Attempt, reception, sack, yard

Today started off in poor form as I attempted to make a party connection with bash, blowout, and reception, for an early strike, as that didn’t work. 

After that strike, we got the green category going with bash, blast, pan, and slam. 

Yellow’s hair salon offerings popped up next as I got cut, blowout, trim and then color.

At the start, I briefly chased a bag and sack connection before deciding better. It did lead me to the blue category with bag, land, score and snag. 

Which left the football category of purple with attempt, reception, sack and yard. Despite recently reviewing both College Football 25 and Madden 25 and being a big football fan, it was a bit disappointing that I pulled this one last. C’est la via.

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #451, which had a difficulty rating of 2.7 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

Twas a nice little puzzle today. 

We kicked it off with the yellow category snagging hint, shred, touch and trace.

I saw cater early so had throw and host marked early. I didn’t consider plan at first but it didn’t fit elsewhere, so blue we go.

I did a similar thing with the green category early on where for some reason I didn’t consider crate and bed as separate things, so I passed over it as I saw other categories better. Bowl and collar were obvious from there.

Purple became a rote fill with brace, caret, hash and star, or 9(0), 6, 3, and 8.