NYT 'Connections' Today: Hints And Answers For Friday, May 16

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights.

Before we get to today's Connections hints and answers, here are Thursday's:

Hey there, Connectors! The weekend is almost here but you know (you know) we've got some important business to take care of first - keeping all those Connections streaks going, of course!

I hate being sick, I really do. I had what I thought at first was a cold, but turned out to be some kind of viral or bacterial thing. It wasn't COVID-19, but something else. I had to take a couple of days off work. It stunk not being able to properly spend time with my partner for 10 days (and nor will we see each other much this weekend since she's building toward a new career by starting a class and I'm very proud of her).

But you know what, I'm back to normal. I intend to make up for a wasted weekend over the next couple of days (I'll tell you more about that in tomorrow's newsletter). The sunshine is here. I have new summertime clothes and I'm ready to make the most of this time of year.

Please take care of yourselves and avoid getting sick as best as you can! It sucks!

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.

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.

Not perfect game this time, but that's win number 80 in the books for my current streak. Here's how I fared:

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟦🟦🟦🟪

🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟪🟪🟪🟪

🟦🟦🟦🟦

I suspect this one might be a streak-breaker, but if you're here, hopefully the hints helped you avoid succumbing to that fate!

VINE felt like it could have gone with HOLLYWOOD, SUNSET and RODEO as a group of famous street names in Los Angeles. But since we had a Sunset Strip reference on the grid very recently, I thought that might be a red herring (and perhaps a little too niche of a group). So I tried VINE with what turned out to be the yellows.

With VINE out of the way, RODEO, WALL STREET, MICHAEL JORDAN and HOLLYWOOD made sense together as a group of American icons. I was one away from a group there. I wasn't confident about which one of those was incorrect, so I left them alone for the time being and turned my attention elsewhere.

END and SCRAP were my entry points into the greens, so I got those squared away. I thought for a second that DISSOLVE, END and SUNSET might be part of a group of the last things you'd see in a movie (as in the "The End" card that used to pop up in many older films). When tech companies kill off apps or services, they often say they're "sunsetting" a product, so all of that made sense.

At that point, I was a little puzzled about NEUROPLASTIC and why that might be on the grid. It didn't seem to fit with anything else, so I figured that there had to be some kind of purpley wordplay going on. Sure enough, as I looked more closely at that and the remaining words, the purples became clear.

That left the blues. Thanks to TAURUS, RODEO and MICHAEL JORDAN, I figured out the connection there. The bull represents TAURUS and obviously there are bulls in a typical RODEO. MICHAEL JORDAN, of course, became a superstar while playing for the Chicago Bulls.

There is a charging bull statue close to WALL STREET that's a symbol of New York City's financial district. A bull is also a symbol of prosperity and financial optimism, hence the term "bull market" when stock prices have risen significantly.

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. After "A Little Respect" was a Strands hint earlier this week, I went down a little bit of an Erasure rabbit hole. Not only have I listened to "Always" several times over the last few days, I went back and played a classic game that features the song, Robot Unicorn Attack. It's so much fun:

Have a great day! Stay hydrated! Call someone you love!