Looking for Tuesday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:
It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means: it’s time for another round of Connections!
For the last few years, I’ve been diligently logging every movie I watch in Letterboxd. Film was my first real cultural love and I once harbored dreams of making films myself (hey, it could still happen!).
But as I was looking at my diary in the app recently, I realized I’ve only watched 31 films so far this year. That’s a pretty small number for me. It doesn’t help that I’ve only been to the cinema once thus far in 2024, despite being able to get to a multiplex within about 25 minutes.
So that’s one of my goals for next year, to watch more movies. I’ve long been meaning to watch every entry in Empire’s list of the 500 greatest movies of all time from 2008, as voted on by fans, filmmakers and critics. That seems like a good starting point. There are so many so-called classics that I haven’t seen.
Hey, maybe we could start a little movie club in our Discord! Speaking of which…
Before we get started, I’ve started a discussion group for Connections and this column on Discord. You can chat about each game (and other topics) with me and other folks. I’m always curious how other people approach the game, so join us! It’s fun.
It’s also the best way to give me any feedback about the column, especially on the rare(!) occasions that I mess something up.
Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Wednesday, December 18, 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…
- TACKLE
- TEAPOT
- HOLD
- ONION
- SHORT
- FIELD
- STOUT
- HEDGE
- HANDLE
- SOUR
- TRADE
- CAPITOL
- BITTER
- CHROME
- MANAGE
- BOCK
And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:
- Yellow group — take care of something
- Green group — these might be on tap
- Blue group — common terms on Bay Street or in The City
- Purple group — semi-circular, perhaps
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 — deal with
- Green group — styles of beer
- Blue group — investment verbs
- Purple group — ____ dome
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 — deal with (FIELD, HANDLE, MANAGE, TACKLE)
- Green group — styles of beer (BITTER, BOCK, SOUR, STOUT)
- Blue group — investment verbs (HEDGE, HOLD, SHORT, TRADE)
- Purple group — ____ dome (CAPITOL, CHROME, ONION, TEAPOT)
A second straight perfect game, this time with a regular rainbow, extends my streak to five wins! Here’s how I fared:
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪
No real issues today. I’m starting to get worried about what two relatively easy games — at least for me — portends for the rest of the week!
HANDLE and MANAGE guided me toward the yellows. I wasn’t sure about what would go with BITTER, SOUR and STOUT, but BOCK was the only thing that made sense.
I’ve been learning a lot about investing this year, so the blues were fairly straightforward. (I couldn’t just give you Wall Street for the clue. That would have been too easy.) I hesitated for a second about whether to include CAPITOL, but it’s a different term from “capital” and it’s not a verb anyway.
It’s just as well that I got the blues without any issue, because I didn’t know ONION dome or TEAPOT dome. I knew the shape of an ONION dome, but not what it was called. Oddly enough, it’s an onion-shaped dome that’s part of a building:
Before I looked it up, I thought a TEAPOT dome was going to be some terrible name for a tea cozy, but no! It’s apparently a huge political scandal from a century ago.
I have never heard of this, and I just know that I’m about to spend too much time learning about it. Probably on YouTube rather than from books. Thanks for nothing, millennial attention span!
That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog tomorrow for hints and the solution for Thursday’s game if you need them.
P.S. I don’t have a big backstory or spiel about this song. I just feel like it’s a perfect kind of thing for a December Wednesday.
I stumbled onto this randomly, probably in a newsletter I read. I don’t really know. I have a lot of tabs open at any given time and it was buried in one of them. I’d never heard of the artist Roy Blair either.
Anyway! I enjoyed this. It’s a fun bop that might help energize you for the back half of the week. Shimmy shimmy, indeed:
Have a great day! Call someone you love!
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.
