Looking for Sunday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:
Hello! Welcome to the start of a new week. I think one of the best things about this time of year is having an excuse to eat some chocolate in the morning after popping open the advent calendar window for that day.
As a kid, I would sometimes leave it for a few days so I would have extra chocolate. If I’d understood that was one of the principles behind saving and investing at an early age (as well as concepts like compound interest), I’d be in a healthier financial position now!
Anyway, today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Monday, December 2, are coming right up.
How To Play Connections
Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day. You can play on the NYT website or Games app.
You’re presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.
There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.
Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.
Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.
If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.
If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the publication’s Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.
Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints for each grid via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.
What Are Today’s Connections Hints?
Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.
Today’s 16 words are…
- TRUMPET
- CROQUET
- CROCODILE
- PAPER
- ALLIGATOR
- HAIR
- WHAC-A-MOLE
- HERALD
- POLO PLAYER
- BROADCAST
- LAUREL
- XYLOPHONE
- CARPENTRY
- VIDEO
- SWOOSH
- DECLARE
And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:
- Yellow group — proclaim
- Green group — linked by an item that has a long handle and a barrel-shaped end
- Blue group — fashion emblems
- Purple group — linked by a word meaning to punch. Alternatively, a rate of speed or an example of one’s published writing
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Need some extra help?
Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.
Today’s Connections groups are…
- Yellow group — announce
- Green group — things involving mallets
- Blue group — icon embroidered on a polo shirt
- Purple group — ____ clip
What Are Today’s Connections Answers?
Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections answers.
This is your final warning!
Today’s Connections answers are…
- Yellow group — announce (BROADCAST, DECLARE, HERALD, TRUMPET)
- Green group — things involving mallets (CARPENTRY, CROQUET, WHAC-A-MOLE, XYLOPHONE)
- Blue group — icon embroidered on a polo shirt (CROCODILE, LAUREL, POLO PLAYER, SWOOSH)
- Purple group — ____ clip (ALLIGATOR, HAIR, PAPER, VIDEO)
No perfect game today, thanks to some silly errors. But that’s five games on the trot for yours truly. Here’s how I fared:
🟪🟦🟦🟦
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟨🟪
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
POLO PLAYER (Ralph Lauren) made it pretty clear to me that there was a group of fashion logos. But a guess of that and ALLIGATOR, LAUREL (Fred Perry) and SWOOSH (Nike) was one away from a group. Silly me, the Lacoste logo is a CROCODILE, not an ALLIGATOR — easy to get those two mixed up! Nonetheless, that took care of the blues. Funnily enough, I’m wearing a Nike workout T-shirt as I write this.
I then made a silly mistake by including TRUMPET with a WHAC-A-MOLE, CROQUET and XYLOPHONE. I meant to include CARPENTRY instead. You can thank me for not using this as the clue:
I’m so sorry about that.
The yellows stood out to me on the smaller grid, but since I always want to clear the purple group as early as possible, I submitted those first. Or I at least tried to. I misclicked again and addicentally included BROADCAST instead of ALLIGATOR. D’oh!
I wasn’t actually sure what an alligator clip was offhand, but I deduced the purple connection otherwise (clip is such a great word — it has so many meanings!). As it happens, an alligator clip is sometimes called a crocodile clip. I wonder how many people will get tripped up by that today…
That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Tuesday’s game if you need them.
P.S. I really, really love The Darkness. Have done since I was a kid, so for over 20 years. I spent far too much money to play songs from their debut album on the jukebox at my student union’s pool hall. Anyway, an annual tradition for me is to use the band’s Christmas song as my ringtone for all of December.
Twenty-one years later, I’m still salty that it was pipped to the number one spot in the Christmas singles chart (a weirdly important thing in the U.K.) by Michael Andrews’ and Gary Jules’ admittedly great cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” But “Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)” — and the thinly veiled juvenile joke in the title — will forever be number one in my heart:
Have a great day!
If you’re so inclined, please do follow my blog for more coverage of Connections and other word games and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me out a lot! Also, follow me on Bluesky! It’s fun there.
