Looking for Thursday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:
Hey folks! Happy Friday.
We did it! We reached the end of February! The end of another month I struggle to spell!
Most importantly, spring is officially only three weeks away for us lot in the northern hemisphere. It’ll probably be mid-April before the winter has finally vanished around my neck of the woods but, goodness, I’m looking forward to sitting outside again.
Before we begin, I’ve set up a discussion group for Connections and this column on Discord. We have a great little community over there and we chat about more than NYT games. Everyone who has joined has been lovely and supportive of each other. It’s a fun hangout spot.
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 Friday, February 28, 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…
- PEACH
- YO-YO
- EGG
- MARBLES
- TOOTHPASTE
- WAFFLE
- DOLL
- MIND
- GENIE
- ANGEL
- SENSE
- HESITATE
- WAVER
- WITS
- BELL
- DEAR
And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:
- Yellow group — have trouble choosing
- Green group — a gem of a human
- Blue group — mental clarity
- Purple group — wait, you can’t reverse these parts
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 — have trouble choosing
- Green group — a gem of a human
- Blue group — mental clarity
- Purple group — wait, you can’t reverse these parts
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 — be indecisive (HESITATE, WAFFLE, WAVER, YO-YO)
- Green group — lovely person (ANGEL, DEAR, DOLL, PEACH)
- Blue group — lucidity (MARBLES, MIND, SENSE, WITS)
- Purple group — components of metaphors for things that can’t be undone (BELL, EGG, GENIE, TOOTHPASTE)
I got a threepeat thanks to a perfect game. Here’s how I fared:
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
I fudged the results a little by submitting the purples before the blues once I knew the latter. I only got the purple group by default. There was no chance I was getting that one.
Otherwise, this was a regular rainbow for me. The yellows posed no problem. It took a few moments for me to assemble the greens as it didn’t initially click that ANGEL would go with them.
With half the words left, the blues seemed obvious. “Your MARBLES” is an idiom that refers to your mental health or capacity to think clearly.
But I submitted the purples as my third group. This one seems like a bit of a stretch! My best guesses for the metaphors are “you can’t unring a BELL,” “you can’t unscramble an EGG,” “you can’t put a GENIE back in the lamp” and “you can’t put TOOTHPASTE back in the tube.”
Some of these are arguably achievable with some difficulty, but there you have it. Given how odd this purple group was, I went a little easier than usual with my blue clue.
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 Saturday’s game if you need them.
P.S. I’m a big fan of The Darkness and I really enjoy frontman Justin Hawkins’ YouTube channel, where he often reacts to and breaks down songs by other artists. An older video from the channel popped up in my feed recently, and it introduced me to this absolutely astonishing solo artist named Ren.
In “Hi Ren,” the rapper and guitarist has a conversation with his inner voice about his mental and physical health, and how he lives with it. I find this genuinely remarkable. Ren combines performance, musicianship, incisive and precise lyrics and palatable emotion combine into something unforgettable.
I’ve tried to write a song or two about dealing with my inner voice (mainly to do with impostor syndrome) and was never quite able to crack it. Ren absolutely did that with a piece that eloquently articulates his own mental health.
Note that it’s not entirely safe for work due to some cussing. Still, I’ll be listening to and digesting this stunning piece of art (and Ren’s other work) for a very long time:
Have a great day! Stay hydrated! 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.
