NYT Connections today hints and answers — Monday, November 25 (#533)

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 25 for puzzle #533 is just as hard as yesterday's puzzle, 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 four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #532, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #533. 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: Attain
• 🟩 Green: Large group
• 🟦 Blue: Parts of a ship
• 🟪 Purple: Associated principles in Chinese philosophy

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: Set sail together and gain some enlightenment.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #533?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Attain: Earn, score, land, win
• 🟩 Large group: Crowd, flock, host, sea
• 🟦 Parts of a ship: Anchor, bow, bridge, deck
• 🟪 Associated principles in Chinese philosophy: Expansive, light, masculine, yang

Today's puzzle was a tough one, but I managed to kick things off by clearing one of the hardest categories on the board with anchor, bow, bridge, and deck.

After that I got a couple of strikes trying to force score in with the rest of the green category: crowd, flock, host, and sea. All words for large groups, and though score also means "a group of about 20," which might be considered large by some standards, apparently not the Connection Crew's.

Yellow, with earn, score, land, and win, was the second-to-hardest category for me to solve today, which was different. Which only left purple as today's rote fill, which took things to a philosophical level that I wasn't expecting.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #532, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

I took three strikes nearly right away and was hanging by my fingernails with the last strike through finishing the puzzle. Usually I use strikes as a way to test out wilder groupings or when I'm stubbornly forcing a category.

I was forcing a dentistry category and remain annoyed at the lack of one.

Outside of that, I knocked the yellow out with account, chronicle, description and story. Then I took three straight strikes forcing the dentist group.

Eventually, I got to what I thought was a gooey category with gum, latex, resin and sap. I had forgotten that latex comes from trees. Ah well.

Briefly, I was hunting for a games group with checkers, ball-in-cup and roulette. That didn't work but it did lead me to the purple category where I was looking at things that were black.

Thus, checkers, licorice, roulette and balance sheet.

And we wrapped this up with things on sticks; ball-in-cup, corn dog, cotton swab, lollipop.

A sigh of relief and a visit to the mental factory to see why things weren't clicking.