Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Good luck finishing this Connections all on your own today, as we have both a very hard Blue and very hard Purple Group if you ask me. Check below for hints and answers.
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.
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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.
- DRESS
- WISHBONE
- ROLLER
- BALL
- SHOWER
- STETHOSCOPE
- BRUSH
- MIXER
- SLINGSHOT
- SPRAY CAN
- RECEPTION
- COMPUTER KEY
- FLUCTUATION
- TUNING FORK
- WORK PERIOD
- PALETTE KNIFE
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – MIXER
- 🟢 Green Group – ROLLER
- 🔵 Blue Group – WISHBONE
- 🟣 Purple Group – DRESS
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Bring a present
- 🟢 Green Group – Choose your color first
- 🔵 Blue Group – Check the alphabet
- 🟣 Purple Group – A common word to replace them
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow Group – Kinds of Parties
- 🟢Green Group – Ways to Apply Paint
- 🔵 Blue Group – Y-Shaped Things
- 🟣 Purple Group – What “Shift” Might Refer To
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 – Kinds of Parties (BALL, MIXER, RECEPTION, SHOWER)
- 🟢Green Group – Ways to Apply Paint (BRUSH, PALETTE KNIFE, ROLLER, SPRAY CAN)
- 🔵 Blue Group -Y-Shaped Things (SLINGSHOT, STETHOSCOPE, TUNING FORK, WISHBONE)
- 🟣 Purple Group – What “Shift” Might Refer To (COMPUTER KEY, DRESS, FLUCTUATION, WORK PERIOD)
Tough selection here, though Yellow Group wasn’t so bad. MIXER is something that sent me back to my college days, but the rest of these are more adult, having to do with weddings, then babies then…growing up and being royalty, I guess?
Green Group requires you to be either a bit of an artist or a bit of a contractor. Maybe a graffiti sprayer? Well, I think you only use one or two of these for that. There are only so many things you use a PALETTE KNIFE for, so I think this one was easy to make come together. More than the others, at least.
Blue Group does that thing where it takes you out of the application of the words and in this case, into the visuals of the objects which simply never crossed my mind. You imagine linking STETHOSCOPE to medicine or WISHBONE to food but it’s nothing even close to that. These one are very tricky.
However, I think Purple Group surpasses them all this week, as figuring out that these all have SHIFT in common, and not even doing it in (word) ____ format was very difficult, especially if you’re me and have never heard of a SHIFT dress before. And while I get it now, SHIFT would not have come to mind reading FLUCTUATION at all. This was hard.
Were you as stumped as I was today?
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