Answers and Clues for August 2

Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:

Are you ready for the hardest purple group category you’ve ever seen? When you don’t even know the word that’s the group name itself, you’re bound to be in for trouble.

How to Play Connections

Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.

The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.

There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.

You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles. So, onto the hints and answers:

Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers.

COMMERCE
STRIKE
CLEAVE
FOUL
ADHERE
CONGRESS
SPLIT
STICK
OVERSIGHT
GLUE
GARNISH
RELATIONS
SANCTION
INTIMACY
AFFIX
SPARE

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

Yellow Group – Bound together tight
Green Group – Hot and heavy
Blue Group – Aiming for 300
Purple Group – Double meanings

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

Yellow Group – Attach with Adhesive
Green Group – Polite Terms for Sex
Blue Group – Bowling Results
Purple Group – Contronyms (words that can mean opposite things)

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:

Yellow Group – Attach with Adhesive (ADHERE, AFFIX, GLUE, STICK)
Green Group – Polite Terms for Sex (COMMERCE, CONGRESS, INTIMACY, RELATIONS)
Blue Group – Bowling Results (FOUL, SPARE, SPLIT, STRIKE)
Purple Group – Contronyms (words that can mean opposite things) (CLEAVE, GARNISH, OVERSIGHT, SANCTION)

We will start off easy here. The sticky Yellow group was not too hard to follow, given that none of these are especially tricky. Cleave, however, could be similar to Adhere, I suppose.

Green Group? Kind of difficult. I think you could connect (no pun intended) Intimacy and Relations together for this category pretty quickly to get a sense of what they were going for. Congress is a stretch but…Commerce? Sexual commerce? Is that like prostitution? I have genuinely never heard of sex referred to in that way. I’m going ot start calling it that.

Blue Group – Not bad. I mean, Spare, Split, Strike, you’ll get those right away. Then just search for the fourth, Foul, and this was an easy set of pins to knock down.

Alright now this Purple Group was insane. I didn’t even know the word “contronyms” existed, much less would I have caught that these words mean their opposite. Cleave to separate or to adhere to makes sense. Garnish you can add to a meal, or you can take away from wages. Oversight is something you miss, or having additional oversight is so you don’t miss something. Sanction? I don’t get it. Did you seriously get this category on your own?

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