Looking for Saturday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
I’m back from my travels and ready to bust out some puzzles. Specifically, we have Sunday’s Connections to solve and groups of words to put together. I thought today’s was pretty straightforward, but each one depends so much on your own word associations and everyone is different. It’s a brand new month, dearest Connectioneers. Let’s dive right in!
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.
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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.
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.
- DIVE
- SLUSH
- FENCE
- LOCK
- SWIM
- HEDGE
- ICE
- HAUNT
- MUTUAL
- GUARANTEE
- JOINT
- RIDE
- CINCH
- SHOOT
- TRUST
- ESTABLISHMENT
Today’s Bonus Clue: The purple group is all about money today.
Hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡Yellow group – Places to grab a beer.
- 🔵Blue group – Words to describe shoring up your success.
- 🟢Green group – Sporting words.
- 🟣Purple group – Add a word to the end of each of these.
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow group – Local watering hole.
- 🔵Blue group– Ensure, as a victory.
- 🟢Green group – Compete in a modern pentathlon.
- 🟣Purple group – ______ Fund
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 – Dive, Establishment, Haunt, Joint
- 🔵Blue group – Cinch, Guarantee, Ice, Lock
- 🟢Green group – Fence, Ride, Shoot, Swim
- 🟣Purple group – Hedge, Mutual, Slush, Trust
I was pretty sure that DIVE and HAUNT went together the moment I saw them and from there, the rest of the yellow words were painfully obvious. I thought the purple group was pretty easy also today, with HEDGE and TRUST popping out as types of funds. From there, finding MUTUAL and SLUSH was easy enough. Now I just need an Erik Fund. I didn’t realize that the green words were all part of a pentathlon, but I was pretty sure they were sports you’d find in the Olympics. This only left the blue group, and once I’d gotten a LOCK on that my victory was a GUARANTEE.
How did you do on today’s Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
