Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
It’s the day after the Fourth of July, so perhaps you’re still stuffed full of hot dogs, but you need to wake up and refresh your brain after a potentially long night with some Connections.
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:
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.
- SHORT
- PINE
- FOLD
- LAUNDRY
- LONG
- BUCKET
- BURN
- STING
- TO-DO
- SCHEME
- STIR
- RACKET
- BEAT
- ITCH
- HUSTLE
- BLEND
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Yellow Group – Don’t fall for it
- Green Group – Delicious process
- Blue Group – Lovelorn
- Purple Group – Check them off
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Yellow Group – Con Game
- Green Group – Combine, as Baking Ingredients
- Blue Group – Yearn
- Purple Group – Kinds of Lists
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 – Con Game (HUSTLE, RACKET, SCHEME, STING)
- Green Group – Combine, as Baking Ingredients (BEAT, BLEND, FOLD, STIR)
- Blue Group – Yearn (BURN, ITCH, LONG, PINE)
- Purple Group – Kinds of Lists (BUCKET, LAUNDRY, SHORT, TO-DO)
Yellow Group here used a word I thought might be a tennis clue, RACKET, as I thought maybe you could combine that with BUCKET for balls you were hitting. This one was tough because I don’t associate a STING with being a con, though I suppose that is technically sort of a police-based con. Sort of an odd classifcaiton though.
Green Group beings the trickery that we thought there was going to be LAUNDRY series of clues, as you can both BEAT and FOLD for different stages of the cleaning process. FOLD is probably the hardest word on that list, but I keep thinking of the episode of Schitt’s Creek where they talk about “folding in the cheese.”
I thought Blue Group might be the hardest today. These are sort of all love-based, minus ITCH, as I mean, does anyone ever say I “ITCH” for you? I don’t think so. BURN and PINE could have been forrest fire related, but I see how they pair together here now. That was tough.
Purple Group is of course also pretty difficult. I think TO-DO was a big clue in terms of getting to the list characterization, but once again, LAUNDRY was there trying to trip us up with other words. BUCKET list and SHORT list make a lot of sense, obviously, so those weren’t as difficult to place here.
How did you do today? Harder or easier this time?
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