NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, September 11 (#459)

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 12 for puzzle #459 take a huge drop in difficulty compared to yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.2 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, #458, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #459. 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 : Mark online for later
• 🟩 Green : Behalf
• 🟦 Blue: NBA legends, familiarly
• 🟪 Purple: Ending with Greek letters

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: Don't get hungry for Japanese dishes, beyond that bookmark this page while remembering some guys from the NBA's past (and 1 present) before deleting letters to make Greek letters.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #459?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Mark online for later: Bookmark, favorite, like, save
• 🟩 Behalf: Advantage, benefit, interest, sake
• 🟦 NBA legends, familiarly: Bird, Curry, Kobe, Magic
• 🟪 Ending with Greek letters: Biota, Feta, Mochi, Pepsi

Where yesterday's 4 was a breeze, today's 3.2 was a struggle, but this one is definitely my own fault.

I confidently kicked things by combining sake, kobe, mochi and curry for a Japanese foods category. Strike one.

I should know better by now to double check the answers in my first category to see if they fit better someone else. The problem for me is I kept reading sake as the Japanese alcoholic drink and note like "Pete's sake." That one is on me.

After strike one, we almost immediately saw Bird and Magic. So, it was easy work putting those NBA legends with Kobe (boo) and Curry.

Then we moved on to the yellow category with bookmark, favorite, like and save.

Here is where I started taking strikes because I was holding on to sake as a drink. I did have advantage, benefit and interest. After taking a couple of strikes, leaving me with one, I finally relented on sake and put it here for the green category. I'm not sure advantage works with this category but who am I to comment at this point?

I may have mentioned before that my least favorite type of purple category is one where you need to remove a letter to see it. Today's hidden Greeks did not endear me to the category, it remains at the bottom of my personal ranking.

Anyway, this one was (b)iota, (f)eta, mo(chi), and pe(psi).

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #457, which had a difficulty rating of 4 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

After several days in a row with puzzles sitting at 3.3 difficulty, today took a leap straight into the fours. Does it match up to that difficulty?

Sort of.

Much of today is based on idioms and slang, which if you don't know or haven't heard of can make it more difficult. Personally, I found today easier than yesterday.

Kicking it off, we had the yellow category with slang for a lot of money; bundle, fortune, mint and pile.

It is appropriate that the purple category is full of purple hued items including amethyst, eggplant, Grimace (of McDonald's fame), and lavender.

I saw the blue connection while I was putting the purple category together and decided to save it for myself. Which meant digging up green for nuggets, pearls, kernels and tidbits of wisdom.

Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies of all time so it was a nice capper to the day with amber, dinosaur, mosquito and paleontologist.

The question with today's answers are if enough of these are common knowledge to make it the most difficulty puzzle of the week so far.