NYT 'Connections' August 24: Clues and Answers for Game #440

If you’ve got a Connections win streak to maintain, or if you are starting a new one, Newsweek has provided some help to ensure you secure a win.

Launched by The New York Times in June of last year, the popular brainteaser has become the publication’s second-most-played game behind Wordle, another word-based puzzle.

For the uninitiated, Connections challenges players to uncover threads connecting a series of words. Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for today’s puzzle are toward the end of the article.

How to Play ‘Connections’

Connections tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, Friday’s game linked the words “Monitor,” “Display,” “Screen,” and “Terminal” under the category “Visual Interface.”

Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep players challenged.

The familiarity of the words used and how often they pop up in modern life are also difficulty factors, although less-common words aren’t used only in the harder categories. “Item overlap,” where one word can be linked to multiple categories, is another way Connections tests players.

A woman uses her smartphone in the street. “Connections” is the second-most popular game under “The New York Times'” banner.

Andrii Iemelyanenko/iStock/Getty Images Plus

If stuck, players can hit the shuffle button, which will mix up where the words appear on the screen.

Wyna Liu, a crossword editor at The New York Times who was asked to develop Connections, told Newsweek about her recommended tips for playing the game.

“My best piece of advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing,” Liu said.

“You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category,” she added. “Don’t try to guess the four words in that category because, even though you know what the fifth member is, you won’t know which of the four it might not be,” which would ultimately waste a turn.

“Don’t do what I do, which is ‘rage solve,'” Liu said.

The answers for today’s Connections puzzle will be revealed at the end of this article, so scroll with caution if you want to work them out yourself.