NYT Connections today hints and answers — Friday, September 13 (#460)

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 13 for puzzle #460 jump up in difficulty compared to yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.7 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, #459, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #460. 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 : Vitality
• 🟩 Green : Palindromes featuring "E"
• 🟦 Blue: Featured in "Jack and the Beanstalk"
• 🟪 Purple: Car models

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: Recall the story of Jack and his journey up the vine. Then consider car names before looking at palindromes and ending with some life.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #460?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Vitality: Energy, juice, life, zip
• 🟩 Palindromes featuring "E": Level, pep, refer, tenet
• 🟦 Featured in "Jack and the Beanstalk": Bean, cow, giant, Jack
• 🟪 Car models: Beetle, Civic, Focus, Volt

It always feels surprising when you get the harder categories early because they feel obvious versus the supposed "easier" categories.

I started today with the blue category having seen beans and cow, that led me to Jack and then giant for story bits from Jack and the Beanstalk. I think this could easily be a yellow or green category.

I was trying to put the yellow category together with Volt when I saw Civic. It clicked from there and Beetle jumped out immediately. I forgot about the Ford Focus but was able to pop that one in for the purple category.

The yellow category was so full of traps that I was legitimately surprised it's considered the easiest one. Trust me, if I hadn't already gotten rid of Volt I would have taken strikes trying to make it fit with energy, juice, life and zip. As it is, I took strikes trying to make Pep work.

I was so caught up in putting the yellow group together that I never saw the green category. The yellow was so obvious that it was frustrating when I took strikes with the wrong words.

The palindrome as a category is cool with level, pep, refer and tenet.

The difficulty of this level actually comes from how tricky the yellow category is from jump with six possible words available to fit the group. Should the yellow category be the trickiest one if it's also the easiest? I'm not against it, but again, for me, it's weird when I knock out the alleged "harder" groupings early because the "easy" ones aren't coming together.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #459, which had a difficulty rating of 3.2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

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 somewhere 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).