Note : Make sure to complete today’s NYT Connections before reading further! We’ll be getting into spoilers for today’s game pretty quickly. If you need some help to complete the grid, you can find my NYT Connections hints and answers column for today right here :

Hey there, Connectors! Welcome to my deeper dive into today’s Connections answers. The idea behind this is to help clear things up for anyone who isn’t sure how today’s groups fit together.

If I’ve missed any red herrings or misunderstood something, let me know via email or on Discord . I don’t typically look at X or check the comments here.

I’m going to assume that you’ve already beaten today’s game. We’re going straight into spoiler territory here. So, consider this your one and only warning .

Here are today’s NYT Connections answers explained (and any red herrings I spot) for Thursday, August 20:

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Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase

Today’s NYT Connections Answers Explained

Connections – Yellow Group

🟨 kinds of pizza (DIAVOLA, HAWAIIAN, MEAT LOVERS, WHITE)

A DIAVOLA pizza leans into spice with the likes of salami, soppressata and hot peppers. DIAVOLA translates to “devil.”

The HAWAIIAN, which was invented in Canada, famously features pineapple with ham or bacon. I don’t mind it. Put whatever you want on pizzas!

A MEAT LOVERS pizza has lots of meat, weirdly enough. Sausage, bacon and pepperoni are the usual toppings here.

As for a WHITE pizza, that doesn’t have a tomato sauce base. It may use bechamel sauce or ricotta as the bottom layer instead.

Connections – Green Group

🟩 kinds of numbers (ATOMIC, SERIAL, SOCIAL SECURITY, TELEPHONE)

The category title has us covered here.

🟦 similarly shaped typographical marks (APOSTROPHE, CEDILLA, COMMA, OKINA)

The APOSTROPHE and COMMA are extremely common punctuation marks in English, so I won’t go over those.

The ʻOKINA (ʻ) is used in Hawaiian to denote a glottal stop :

The CEDILLA (¸) is a mark that appears under certain letters in some Latin and Sub-Saharan African languages. You might see it in Portuguese, Catalan or French under the letter "c," as in ça va or taça .

I think the CEDILLA looks more like a 5 than a 6 or 9, so I think it’s a little different from the others mentioned here.

Connections – Purple Group

🟪 starting with Chinese zodiac animals (DRAGONFLY, OXFORD, PIGMENT, RATCHET)

  • DRAGONFLY > dragon
  • OXFORD > ox
  • PIGMENT > pig
  • RATCHET > rat

Connections – Red Herrings

SERIAL and OXFORD are both types of COMMA (different names for the same thing, really). That’s all I’ve got on the red herring front today.

If you’d like to chat about today’s game of Connections and just about anything else with me and a very lovely group of people, you can do just that in our Discord community . We’d love for you to hang out with us.

I’ll be back with another set of NYT Connections hints and answers tomorrow, as well as another edition of this one, all going well. You’ll be able to find both of those on my Forbes author page when the time comes (following me there helps me out too!). As for the weekend editions of my NYT Connections hints and answers column, I’m currently doing that via my newsletter, Pastimes .