NYT ‘Connections' Hints And Answers For Friday, May 9

Forbes

08-05-2025

Find the links between the words to win today's game of Connections.
Looking for Thursday's NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Hello, Connectors! The happiest of Fridays to you all.
I am afraid I have to admit that I have an entirely new obsession. Last weekend, I did something I almost never do: I went channel hopping for a while to find something to watch. As soon as I landed on Canada's version of ESPN: The Ocho, a familiar but strange sport caught my eye.
Long-time readers will be aware that I'm a big fan of football (the one you actually play with your feet most of the time). I'm a Scot, it's in my blood.
OmegaBall is a fascinating variant of that. It's played on a circular pitch with three teams and three goals instead of two. Here's how it works:
My jaw dropped, because I'd never heard of OmegaBall before. I watched my first ever match and it was a lot of fun. It's very fast paced, and at least in the match I watched, there were tons of goals scored. It helps that players have two different goals to shoot at. At one point, I saw a goalkeeper score directly like it was nothing. That's a very rare occurrence in standard football.
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I'm excited to watch more OmegaBall, especially with the European football season wrapping up in the next couple of weeks.
Before we begin, we have a great little community on Discord, where we chat about NYT Connections, the rest of the NYT games and all kinds of other stuff. Everyone who has joined has been lovely. It's a fun hangout spot, and you're more than welcome to hang out with us.
Discord is also the best way to give me any feedback about the column, especially on the rare (or not-so-rare) occasions that I mess something up. I don't look at the comments or Twitter much. You can also read my weekend editions of this column at my new newsletter, Pastimes.
Today's NYT Connections hints and answers for Friday, May 9 are coming right up.
Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day. You can play on the NYT's website or Games app.
You're presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.
There's only one solution for each puzzle, and you'll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.
Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.
Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you're incorrect, you'll lose a life. If you're close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you're one word away from getting it right, but you'll still need to figure out which one to swap.
If you make four mistakes, it's game over. Let's make sure that doesn't happen with the help of some hints, and, if you're really struggling, today's Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it's easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.
If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the publication's Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.
Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.
Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today's Connections groups, I'll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.
Today's 16 words are...
And the hints for today's Connections groups are:
Need some extra help?
Be warned: we're starting to get into spoiler territory.
Today's Connections groups are...
Spoiler alert! Don't scroll any further down the page until you're ready to find out today's Connections answers.
This is your final warning!
Today's Connections answers are...
That's a 73-game winning streak for me now. I would have had a perfect game if not for a couple of silly errors. Here's how I fared:
🟦🟦🟨🟦
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟪🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟪🟪🟪
Lots of words related to light today, that's interesting. The DIM SUM reference on the top line was fun too.
I thought PRODUCT, DIFFERENCE, CONTRAST and QUOTIENT would make sense together, but I was one away from a group. Of course, SUM should have been in there instead of CONTRAST. That squared away the blues.
I was one away again on my next guess of DIM, VAGUE, FAINT and SHADE. Looking around at the other words, REMOTE made the most sense instead of SHADE. I was thinking of them in terms of having a very small chance of success rather than distant memories.
It felt weird to have a 50/50 shot between the yellow group and purple group. They both seemed pretty straightforward. I took a gamble but I got the yellows first. That left the surprisingly straightforward purples for the win.
That's all there is to it for today's Connections clues and answers. I'll be back with you all here on Monday. In the meantime, you can check out my weekend editions of this column in my newsletter, Pastimes.
P.S. We're rolling into to the weekend, so let's go with a very fun and silly song to get the party started. I've long loved "Danger! High Voltage" by Electric Six. It's a funny, funky disco rock track with backing vocals from none other than Jack White.
I can't think of any other song that rhymes "gates of hell" with "Taco Bell." The video is very silly too, but maybe a little too racy for this website, so let's go with an audio-only version:
Have a great day! Stay hydrated! Call someone you love!
Please follow my blog for more coverage of NYT Connections and other word games, and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me out a lot! Sharing this column with other people who play Connections would be appreciated too. You can also read my weekend editions of this column at my new newsletter, Pastimes.