Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Decently hard Connections today though it does have a Blue Group I enjoyed 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. 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 you may 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.
- EASY
- WHOOPEE
- BELT
- GOGGLES
- CUTIE
- PHRASE
- PIN
- COUCH
- HOT DOG
- EFFECTS
- EXPRESS
- RAZOR
- I OWE YOU
- YAHOO
- FRAME
- HURRAH
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – HOT DOG
- 🟢 Green Group – COUCH
- 🔵 Blue Group – CUTIE
- 🟣 Purple Group – PIN
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – !
- 🟢 Green Group – Relay
- 🔵 Blue Group – Shorten it up
- 🟣 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 – Quaint expressions of excitement
- 🟢 Green Group – Convey
- 🔵 Blue Group – Words abbreviated with letters as homophones
- 🟣 Purple Group – Safety _____
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 – Quaint expressions of excitement (HOT DOG, HURRAH, WHOOPEE, YAHOO)
- 🟢 Green Group – Convey (COUCH, EXPRESS, FRAME, PHRASE)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Words abbreviated with letters as homophones (CUTIE, EASY, EFFECTS, I OWE YOU
- 🟣 Purple Group – Safety _____ (BELT, GOGGLES, PIN, RAZOR)
Kind of a tough one today? I though the idea would start with Whoopee and Couch both being cushion, but I think they planned for that. Meanwhile, Hot Dog was the one that threw me off in yellow group as I don’t think anyone has said that since 1960 as a phrase rather than a food.
Green Group I understand now, but in the moment that was pretty hard, given how many other meanings all of this words have. Couch is a word that isn’t often used in this context, while Frame you would imagine might connect with Pin, as in, the blame.
Blue Group is cute but threw me off. I saw IOU and was looking for other words that were abbreviated like that, with the first letters, but instead it’s just homophones, QT, EZ and FX.
Finally, we have some words that you’d be good at depending if you are hands-on in your line of work. Well, outside of Safety Pin I suppose. And I use an electric razor so that doesn’t really apply to me. What is a Safety Belt?
Which ones tripped you up?
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