Today’s Connections Hints & Answers For October 19, 2024 (Puzzle #495)

If you have a bee in your bonnet about today’s Connections puzzle, you might want to get that sorted out. To help you do so, we have everything you need to make that happen, including tips, tricks, and the occasional jests. Today’s puzzle was easier in some ways but a little harder in others, because of two categories in particular. These categories have a fair amount of overlap and very similar words, so you will have to pay close attention to get it right.

If you want to try something a little different, you should try NYT’s The Strands puzzle. It is very similar to something like a word search, but it has a theme that all of the words are related to. If you guess the wrong word, you will start stacking up hints that can help you figure out the actual words and the special golden word that the whole puzzle revolves around.

Today’s Connections Category Hints

OCTOBER 19 #495

If you want to get the right answers, you will need a nuanced understanding of several words. There are a lot of words that could all belong in a giant category together, so understanding what differentiates them is important. In this puzzle, you will want to look carefully at the verbs and decide what makes them different from each other and which ones could belong somewhere else. You can find four more clues below to help you distinguish between them even more:

• One category is about a group of verbs
• One category is about a group of things that have one of the five senses in common
• One category is about things that can hurt you in a particular way
• One category is about four things that are all big names in a particular media

To get the rest of the puzzle solved, you will need the category names. This is the most important thing to get right as it determines how you win the game.

Today’s Connections Answers

OCTOBER 19 #495

Yellow Answers: Revealed & Explained

This was actually the last category I solved today as I thought that PROVOKE would have been with other more violent words. Instead, it is with a rather mild group of words that just means to bring about something else. I did think that the words GENERATE, INSPIRE, and PROMPT likely belonged together, but at the time I only saw three words without PROVOKE and decided it was a trick until the end of the puzzle when only these four words were left.

Green Answers: Revealed & Explained

Similarly, in this category, I thought INCENSE belonged more with PROVOKE and other words. However, as I looked around for other words after being proved wrong on that account, I found LOTION and SOAP and thought it might be a bath and body works category. The next thing I saw was CANDLE, which did change my mind on exactly what the category was, and I realized that INCENSE had to belong here. It’s really a category full of things that trigger my asthma, but I’ll pretend otherwise for the sake of the puzzle.

Blue Answers: Revealed & Explained

This one was fun once I realized what was going on. I saw WASP and JELLYFISH and knew they both had stingers of a kind. NETTLE was the next word I added in, and I had to find the last word. By this time, my theory about the other words that INSULT would have gone with had been disproved, so I figured that this had to be a sting in a more metaphorical sense. And it gave me an excuse to think about Finding Nemo, which is always a mostly pleasant time with the slight sting of tears.

Purple Answers: Revealed & Explained

This was actually the first category I managed to solve today, probably because of my immersion in the video game world. I saw MADDEN and CIVILIZATION right away, and while I only play one of those, I am well aware that sports games do exist. After that, I had a gander at the rest of the words, and I saw HALO and METROID and knew that it could not be a coincidence. It would have been quite odd if these words had not been part of a category together.

Other Games Like Connections

If you want to continue your puzzling adventures, you should try out one of the ones in the table below. I personally had a great time trying out Dordle recently and found myself solving their free-style puzzles multiple times in a row as I learned its secrets.