Looking for Monday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:
Hey, there! I hope your week is off to a great start.
One thing I made sure to do in the Black Friday sales was to pick up some new clothes. There’s a particular brand that has become my go-to over the last year or two, but I felt like it was time to expand beyond my usual uniform of black T-shirts. So I picked up new variants of the same T-shirt I always wear but in new colors and prints. I now have it in two funky floral prints that I’m looking forward to wearing at holiday get-togethers. Having a little extra color in your life is rarely a bad thing.
Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Tuesday, December 3, 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…
- COOKIE
- EMMY
- GRAMMY
- KATIE
- JUNIOR
- OSCAR
- TONY
- POP
- CECE
- MUMMY
- COUNT
- MEADOW
- SNUFFY
- CUZ
- CARMELA
- EDIE
And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:
- Yellow group — HBO family members who could be singers
- Green group — casual names for loved ones
- Blue group — PBS mainstays for kids
- Purple group — these could probably be about half as long
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 — Sopranos
- Green group — familial nicknames
- Blue group — Sesame Street characters
- Purple group — names that sound like two letters
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 — Sopranos (CARMELA, JUNIOR, MEADOW, TONY)
- Green group — familial nicknames (CUZ, GRAMMY, MUMMY, POP)
- Blue group — Sesame Street characters (COOKIE, COUNT, OSCAR, SNUFFY)
- Purple group — names that sound like two letters (CECE, EDIE, EMMY, KATIE)
Nice, I got a perfect game today. That’s six wins on the trot for your old pal. Here’s how I fared:
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
There was a major red herring here in terms of the EGOT awards: EMMY, GRAMMY, OSCAR and TONY. But as I was about to throw caution to the wind and submit those as a group, CARMELA caught my eye. I realized that had to go with TONY, MEADOW and JUNIOR for the yellows. The Sopranos is such a great show, but I imagine this will be a tricky group for those who haven’t seen it — not exactly a yellow-level group to me.
That meant GRAMMY had to go with the rest of the greens (though I imagine that having MUMMY instead of “mommy” will throw some folks off). I felt that the blues were pretty straightforward too, even though I wasn’t completely sure about SNUFFY. While I like Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch, The Count is by far my favorite Sesame Street character.
I decided to submit what I thought were the purples before the blues, since I try to get those as early as possible. I didn’t figure out that connection, but I probably should have. You can pronounce those words as C-C, E-D, M-A and K-T.
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 Wednesday’s game if you need them.
P.S. Yesterday, I touched on how much of a weirdly important cultural thing the race for the number one spot on the U.K. Christmas singles chart is (well, at least until Ladbaby completely ruined it). The honor often went to a charity or novelty song, but starting in the mid-2000s, the debut single from each year’s winner from the reality show The X-Factor won out.
In 2009, a campaign to bite back against that paid off when Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name” emerged victorious. If you’re unfamiliar with it, this one’s both loud and NSFW:
Since they were clearly in contention for the number one spot, Rage Against The Machine were invited to play the song on BBC Radio 5 Live. The station asked the band not to include the swears. You know, in a protest song that rails against the ills of society, especially police brutality. Vocalist Zack de la Rocha obliged at first, but kept the F-bombs in for the big cathartic climax. Glorious stuff.
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.
