NYT Connections today hints and answers — Tuesday, September 3 (#450)

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 3 for puzzle #450 are a tad harder than yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.1 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, #449, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #450. 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 : Absolve
• 🟩 Green : Excessively
• 🟦 Blue : Global currencies
• 🟪 Purple : ____ head

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: Exchange your dollars for another country's money and then check your head consider atonement before wondering if you're being extra.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #450?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Peculiar: Excuse, pardon, save, spare
• 🟩 Assignment: Beyond, extra, over, too
• 🟦 Classic collection items: Pound, real, won, yen
• 🟪 Chain ____: Arrow, block, fore, knuckle

Today, I found in tricky in that I struggled with the yellow and green categories, allegedly the easiest, while quickly knocking out the blue and purple lines.

I almost immediately saw currencies with yen (Japan) and pound (UK) before finding real (Brazil) and rounding it with won (South Korea). If you're stuck with this one and don't know the currencies, the words don't really fit any where else in the grid.

I wasn't looking for it but Knuckle(head) came to mind and the rest of that category clicked with fore(head), block(head). I did take a strike with over(head) but quickly fixed that with arrow(head).

And then I got stuck. I took a couple strikes trying to force a bowling category with save, spare and extra. Having the first two did get me to eventually mark excuse and pardon for the absolve category.

Green then became the rote fill with beyond, extra, over and too. Whew. One strike left.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #448, which had a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

Alyse kicked off today's puzzle with solving the yellow category first again, which meant the pressure was on to figure out the harder categories. Weird is such a...well...weird word, as in it only really has one definition, so it stood out to herfirst. Once she started looking around for synonyms, Off, Funny, and Curious popped out almost immediately.

While today's puzzle was rated easier than yesterday's, she struggled more with it because she kept trying to connect Stamp, Post, and the other mail-related clues. Once that line of thinking hit a dead end, the purple category came to her next, surprisingly enough. She was stumped for a bit after striking out and realizing Letter and Mail had nothing to with Post, but with a little brainstorming, she started thinking back to those "don't break the chain!" emails in the early days of the internet, and that's when Reaction and Store jumped out as other terms that start with chain.

Next came the blue category with Coin, Comic, Record, and Stamp, because she'd seen enough Pawn Stars in her day to be familiar with the world of collectibles.

Green was the rote fill this time around, but it was easy to figure out what Job, Position, Post and Station all had in common.