NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, August 29 (#445)

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on August 29 for puzzle #445 take a step down in difficulty compared to yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #444, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #445. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.

Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it

Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer , where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

• 🟨 Yellow : Kinds of piano
• 🟩 Green : Deem
• 🟦 Blue : U.S. colleges/universities
• 🟪 Purple : Second names in companies with ampersands

These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.

Here's a larger hint: Going down the line, recall different types of Bach players, will considering universities before remembering giant companies.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #445?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Kinds of piano: Electronic, grand, player, upright
• 🟩 Deem: Consider, count, judge, regard
• 🟦 U.S. colleges/universities: Brown, Duke, Howard, Smith
• 🟪 Second names in companies with ampersands: Gamble, Johnson, Noble, Young

I've mentioned before but it is satisfying when you can go down the line with the categories.

I managed that today starting with piano kinds; electronic, grand, player and upright.

I took a strike on green trying to make titles work with count, judge, duke and admittedly forcing noble. The strike opened it up and sticking with count and judge was able to quickly add consider and regard.

Universities was quick from there with Brown, Duke, Howard and Smith.

There were opportunities to get purple early in the search, I was thinking of Johnson & Johnson and Proctor & Gamble, but I've never heard of whatever Noble & (Cooley?) or Young & (Company?) so I wasn't completely sure. Noble & Cooley is an instrument manufacturer known for their drum sets. Young might be Ernst & Young one of the bigger accounting firms in the US. Which made it nice that purple was the rote fill at the end.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #444, which had a difficulty rating of 3.7 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

I started the day with a strike as I put together monkey bars, slide, teeter-totter and tetherball. Swapped out tetherball for swings to cap yellow.

I wasn't looking for things at the end of a cord as a category but got pendulum, tea bag, tetherball and yo-yo where I was thinking of things that yo-yo or teeter-totter as you will.

The purple category came in next with (baby) blues, boomer, steps and teeth. I saw teeth and steps first and put together blues and boomer from there.

The blue category makes sense with things described as dry; desert, humor, martini, and teetotaler.

This one is a hard one and it took a bit to make some of the connections, but nothing feels out of left field like some harder puzzles.