Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
A very hard Purple Group today offset by a very easy Yellow Group, so we will see where you end up.
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.
- GREEK
- HYDRANT
- BATTERY
- HOUSE
- TRITONE
- ENGINE
- ESCAPE
- AT LAST
- WEDGE
- SPACE
- RADIATOR
- CHOPPED
- CONTROL
- HERALD
- SHIFT
- ALTERNATOR
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – BATTERY
- 🟢 Green Group – GREEK
- 🔵 Blue Group – SHIFT
- 🟣 Purple Group – HERALD
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Vroooom
- 🟢 Green Group – Greens for Green Group
- 🔵 Blue Group – It’s in front of you now, probably
- 🟣 Purple Group – ____[word]
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Under the Hood of a Car
- 🟢 Green Group – Kinds of Salad
- 🔵 Blue Group – Keyboard Keys
- 🟣 Purple Group – Starting with Figures from Greek Myth
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 – Under the Hood of a Car (ALTERNATOR, BATTERY, ENGINE, RADIATOR)
- 🟢 Green Group – Kinds of Salad (CHOPPED, GREEK, HOUSE, WEDGE)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Keyboard Keys (CONTROL, ESCAPE, SHIFT, SPACE)
- 🟣 Purple Group – Starting with Figures from Greek Myth (AT LAST, HERALD, HYDRANT, TRITONE)
Yellow Group was pretty easy today as it was pretty hard to come up with alternative meanings for any of those, and I mean, even if you only have cursory knowledge of how a car works, most of these should probably line up for you, even if you don’t know exactly what they all do.
Green Group was also easy except if you’re me, because I have eaten exactly three salads in my life and needless to say I am not familiar with the different kinds except when I’m ordering takeout for my wife. I kept trying to link Space and Shift and Wedge as a way of separating things, but that did not work out.
I had a tough time with Blue Group even though I am currently typing on the answer to this. Those aren’t even seldom-used keys so I feel bad about having such a hard time with this one.
I do not feel bad about having a hard time with Purple Group, which really went out of its way to be extra difficult. It’s not even Greek gods, it’s anything from a Greek myth, Atlas, Hera, Hydra and Triton. Do you even know who Triton is besides Ariel’s father in The Little Mermaid?
Which tripped you up this time?
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.