I’ve been having fun playing the Times’ Connections game and decided to write a tool that would help me when it gets to the final hard part. What the tool does is find the words that most often follow or precede a set of puzzle words. You can find the most likely candidates to solve puzzles (usually the purple one) in the form ___word or word ___. I’ve made a video of the tool in action. The default is to find the highest scoring words that follow the puzzle words, trying to find the connection. If I check the box, it will do the same for words that precede them. In the video I show how after solving the yellow and green groups I am hypothetically stumped at the last two categories. I’d actually solved this already without the help of my tool. I selected four of the eight remaining words that included three connected words as though I was unsure. I could have entered as many as eight, but that would take too long for the video. I ran my tool and it found one of the connections, the word KING. The tool uses the Google Twograms data to determine the frequency of word pairs that include each puzzle word, then selects and orders the ones that have the highest overall frequency combined with multiple (but not necessarily all) puzzle words. Here’s the video.