Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers, Tuesday May 20

Need a hint for today’s Connections on Tuesday, 20th May? Whether or not you’ve got an impeccable Connections record, you might want to avoid failing today’s puzzle all the same. With the help of this handy guide, you never have to fear for your victory streak.

Scroll down to our hints and have a look; that next Connections victory is mere minutes – or even seconds – away.

In this guide:

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

How to play Connections

Connections is one of the most popular (and challenging) daily puzzle games published by the New York Times (owners of Wordle). The aim of Connections is to group the 16 words of the day into four groups, where each group of four words has a common theme.

For instance, the words “Hook”, “Nana”, “Peter”, and “Wendy” are all Peter Pan characters. Or to take another example, “Action”, “Ballpark”, “Go”, and “Stick” are all words which commonly come just before the word “Figure”.

Your job is to figure out what these themes are that connect the various words together – but be wary, because a lot of the time there are deceptive red herring connections placed purely to throw you off! To win the game, you have to find all four Connections without making 4 mistakes. On your fourth mistake, the game is over and the answer is revealed automatically.

Each of the four groups in each day’s Connections puzzle is also assigned a different colour, which represents how easy or difficult the Connection is to find. These colours are: Yellow (Easiest), Green (Easy), Blue (Medium), and Purple (Hardest).

Click here to play today’s Connections puzzle!

Connections hint for Tuesday 20th May

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: An accountant would easily solve this one.
• Green: Commonly found on a farm.
• Blue: Look through your magnifying glass… It’s what these characters would do.
• Purple: Think of places to sleep.
• Extra hint 1: The blue group contains many last names, but the others include one or two last names as well – albeit with another meaning!
• Extra hint 2: ‘Bale’ and ‘log’ are in different groups.

If you need a bit more help, tap the spoiler text below to reveal one word belonging to each group:

• Yellow: Ledger
• Green: Pitchfork
• Blue: Holmes
• Purple: Canopy

Spoiler warning! Today’s Connections groups are revealed just below!

What are today’s Connections groups?

If you need an even bigger clue to figure out today’s Connections puzzle, below we’ll reveal the four correct Connections groups – the themes which link together each set of four words in the Connections grid.

Here are the Connections groups for today:

• Yellow: Account Book
• Green: Seen In A Barn
• Blue: Detectives Of Kid-Lit
• Purple: Words Before “Bed”

Now that you know the themes for the various different Connections in today’s puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check below for the full answer.

Spoiler warning! Today’s Connections answer lies ahead!

What is today’s Connections answer?

Here is the answer to today’s Connections puzzle on Tuesday, 20th May:

• Yellow: Account Book (Ledger, Log, Record, Register)
• Green: Seen In A Barn (Bale, Horse, Pitchfork, Trough)
• Blue: Detectives Of Kid-Lit (Brown, Drew, Hardy, Holmes)
• Purple: Words Before “Bed” (Canopy, Day, Murphy, Water)

Upon seeing ‘trough’ and ‘horse’, I was on the lookout for a farming or western theme. It didn’t take long to add the bale and pitchfork after that, even tough I did wonder about ‘water’ and ‘log’ for a second. If only the rest of the puzzle was this easy!

The blue theme would’ve been a breeze if there weren’t so many family names throughout this Connections riddle. Thanks NYT, now I can’t get away with simply matching a ‘last names’ group… And I’m no expert on detectives in children’s books.

Luckily, I managed to complete the yellow theme before long, which brought me down to eight words. With ‘Bale’ and ‘Ledger’ taken out of the equation, I had one tentative family names group of six candidates, plus ‘water’ and ‘canopy’ in the other. Thanks to ‘Holmes’, I was already thinking of a detective theme, and I was pretty sure about adding ‘Hardy’ – for the wrong reason though, as I was thinking of a ‘detective Hardy’ from the Broadchurch series (not exactly kid-lit). Long story short, I suspected something bed-related in the purple theme, mismatched Murphy and Drew anyway, but eventually got it right.

Congratulations if you got today’s Connections answer right, with or without the help of our handy hints above! And if you didn’t succeed today, don’t worry – a new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!