Welcome back, Connectioneers! If you’re looking for help with today’s puzzling NYT Connections puzzle, I’m here to offer my assistance with some extra clues and the solutions to the Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple groups.
Hey it’s the first Sunday of August, and we have a NYT Connections to solve. It’s a tricky one, too. I was rather stumped and very nearly defeated by this one. So buckle up and let’s get to connecting the words!
Also be sure to check out my weekend streaming guide for all the best TV shows and movies to watch this weekend. There’s some great new stuff out, both at home and in theaters, including the excellent new Spider-Man movie!
Let’s do this!
If you’re looking for Saturday’s Connections guide, it’s right here.
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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.
NYT Connections Hints And Answers – Saturday August 2
Below, we’ll get into some extra hints for each Connections group – Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple – and then the official clues and answers.
Here are today’s Connections words:
- OLGA
- PER
- SO
- FLAX
- THROUGH
- DARK
- VIA
- ACTUALLY
- LORD
- À LA
- WELL
- AIRPLANE
- ASEA
- LIKE
- BY
- BEAST
Here’s an Extra Hint for Each Connections Group
- 🟡Yellow group – Words you’d cut from a transcript without losing a thing.
- 🟢Green group – Passage, in a sense.
- 🔵Blue group – Your phone has one, so does that one guy at the gym.
- 🟣Purple group – Remove a letter and check your boarding pass.
One Word for Each Connections Group:
- 🟡Yellow group – Actually
- 🟢Green group – Per
- 🔵Blue group – Beast
- 🟣Purple group – FLAX
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
- Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow group – Filler Words
- 🟢Green group – Be Means Of
- 🔵Blue group – ____ Mode
- 🟣Purple group – Airport Codes Plus Starting Letter
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. The Connections answers are:
- 🟡Yellow group – LIKE, SO, WELL, ACTUALLY
- 🟢Green group – VIA, PER, THROUGH, BY
- 🔵Blue group – AIRPLANE, DARK, À LA, BEAST
- 🟣Purple group – F+LAX, L+ORD, A+SEA, O+LGA
Here’s the finished puzzle in the order I solved it:
Today’s NYT Connections is a 5/5 on the Connections Bot difficulty scale so about as tough as they come. The nasty bit is LIKE, VIA, À LA, PER, BY, and THROUGH all reading as “by way of” at first glance. Lots and lots of decoys. And the Purple is, as per usual, very sneaky.
In a sense, the Purple words are the most obviously Purple we’ve seen in a minute. The tell for the airport codes is semantic incoherence, the obvious (ironic) mismatch. FLAX is a plant, OLGA is a proper name, ASEA is a crossword-ish archaism meaning “at sea,” and LORD is a title or an expression “Oh lord”. These are all puzzle words, and the connection is made first by noticing how none of them connect at all in the first place.
In some ways, the Blue words were harder simply because (at least for me) it took a long time to realize that you could add MODE to the end of each of them and I kept trying to squeeze A LA in with PER and so forth.
How’d you do on today’s Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Find more guides to Wordle, Pips and Strands on my blog where you can also follow me for TV and movie and video game coverage. Let me know if you have any fun puzzle games in your rotation that I should try on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Have a great Sunday!