NYT Connections today hints and answers — Friday, October 25 (#502)

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 25 for puzzle #502 are a smidge easier than yesterday's puzzle, 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, #501, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #502. 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 : .
• 🟩 Green : Event with dancing
• 🟦 Blue : iPhone message tapback responses
• 🟪 Purple : "Pan"

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: Get yourself to the dance, add a dot, respond to an text with an emoji and get panned.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #502?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 .: Dot, period, point, tittle
• 🟩 Event with dancing: Ball, formal, hop, rave
• 🟦 iPhone message tapback responses: Exclamation points, heart, question mark, thumbs up
• 🟪 "Pan": Bad review, camera movement, cookware, satyr

I went down the line today but hadn't meant to do so.

I saw tittle and period, but somehow skipped over exclamation point and question mark as I grabbed dot and point instead which got us the first symbol title a category that I can remember.

Rave, ball and hop jumped out to me as dances. I wasn't sure on formal at first but it didn't fit anything else, thus the green category.

I am one of those "heathen" Android people, so I never made the iPhone connection. For me these were just emoji response with exclamation points, heart, question mark and thumbs up. At least that's how I use them in Slack for this job.

"Pan" is a great purple category. It's clever, which purple groupings should be. All four are variations on the word pan. Loved it.
For this we had bad review, camera movement, cookware and satyr.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #501, which had a difficulty rating of 3.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

The 500th puzzle was cute and clever. The 501st? A slog.

I saw the purple category right away with adieu, belle and temps, but could not for the life of me remember any other French words that connected. So, we moved on.

The first completed grouping was yellow as we put together slate, program, and schedule before finding bill.

Airplane and crane clued us into the folding idea of blue. Fan was easy enough and it took a moment to remember the fortune teller. Do kids still make the fortune tellers? I hope so.

I also saw the newspaper clue and had News, cooking and games right away but was leery of audio until this point. I don't believe audio is a false cognate in French, but pain is.

I had totally spaced that pain is the French word for bread, annoying since it is similar to pan in Spanish, which I am currently teaching myself.

Anyway, the French words were Adieu, belle, pain and temps (which means weather, though I think it has other meanings as well).

Today's was a puzzle where I always felt one off from the correct answer. So it goes.