Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Prepare yourself for a pretty hard Connections today, including one of the most convoluted Purple Groups we have seen in quite a while, where I was still struggling to understand it after the fact.
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.
- HAND
- HOCK
- PEDAL
- SKATE
- BACON
- CELL
- PICKLE
- CAGE
- DODGE
- COAST
- FORD
- BREEZE
- CRUISE
- RACQUET
- FLOAT
- TRAYED
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – FLOAT
- 🟢 Green Group – PICKLE
- 🔵 Blue Group – FORD
- 🟣 Purple Group – TRAYED
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Smooth sailing
- 🟢 Green Group – If you can dodge a wrench
- 🔵 Blue Group – The A-list
- 🟣 Purple Group – Get out your wallet
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow Group – Glide
- 🟢Green Group – Words Before “Ball” In Sports
- 🔵 Blue Group – Prolific Actors
- 🟣 Purple Group – Homophones of Synonyms For “Vend”
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 – Glide (BREEZE, COAST, FLOAT, SKATE)
- 🟢 Green Group – Words Before “Ball” In Sports (DODGE, HAND, PICKLE, RACQUET)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Prolific Actors (BACON, CAGE, CRUISE, FORD)
- 🟣 Purple Group – Homophones of Synonyms For “Vend” (CELL, HOCK, PEDAL, TRAYED)
Well, how about that? I was already tripped up by the Yellow Group, because I thought for sure that CRUISE would be there with some of those others. I thought they were bike or skateboard related, but even then, I still think that CRUISE really could be in there, and this was extra tricky.
Green Group may have clued you in between PICKLE and RACQUET, as they are two of the most popular, casual ball-related sports here. I think BASKET or FOOT would have given away the game here. My personal favorite? DODGE ball. I know they have adult leagues, but I can’t bring myself to go to one.
Blue Group picked some actor names where they could easily be any number of other things, including the CRUISE I mentioned earlier. FORD, for instance, is attached to an actor, but can also be a verb or the name of a company. The list is: Kevin BACON, Nicholas CAGE, Tom CRUISE and Harrison FORD.
That is a wild group concept for Purple here today. If you’re going to get this, I had to imagine it would have been by default, as this was just incredibly hard. So they are homonyms, but also synonyms for one word, double dip. The words they are emulating are: SELL, HAWK, PEDDLE and…I don’t actually know TREYED. I cannot figure out what this one is supposed to be. Please let me know if you get it.
Really hard puzzle for me today, but maybe you fared somewhat better. Or if not, I hope this guide helped!
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