Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
This was a purple group you probably have zero chance to figure out normally, so you will have to find the other three for sure today.
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.
- HAYSTACK
- PITCHFORK
- COPPER
- OCEAN
- CAST IRON
- ENAMEL
- HURLY-BURLY
- NAIL
- DICK
- CHUCK E. CHEESE
- HAIR
- CROWD
- GUMSHOE
- SKIN
- MILLION
- FLATFOOT
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – HAIR
- 🟢 Green Group – MILLION
- 🔵 Blue Group – DICK
- 🟣 Purple Group – PITCHFORK
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – It’s on you now
- 🟢 Green Group – A whole lot of things
- 🔵 Blue Group – Noir stars
- 🟣 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 – Body Coverings
- 🟢 Green Group – Masses in Idioms
- 🔵 Blue Group – Old Timey Slang for Law Enforcement
- 🟣 Purple Group – Starting with Synonyms for “Throw”
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 – Body Coverings (ENAMEL, HAIR, NAIL, SKIN)
- 🟢 Green Group – Masses in Idioms (CROWD, HAYSTACK, MILLION, OCEAN)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Old Timey Slang for Law Enforcement (COPPER, DICK, FLATFOOT, GUMSHOE)
- 🟣 Purple Group – Starting with Synonyms for “Throw” (CAST IRON, CHUCK E. CHEESE, HURLY-BURLY, PITCHFORK)
This puzzle is awash in tricky words you would think would be grouped together, though Yellow Group starts off with three clearly connected words in the form of hair, nail and skin. Then, you reach for enamel for teeth and you have your answer. I thought it was just “body things” rather than “body coverings,” but it works out the same anyway.
Green Group I am less sure about, given that I thought this was going to be “things that are hard to find one in. Here, that would be “one in a million, needle in a haystack, a drop in the ocean, a face in the crowd.” But instead they’re just the more generalized term for masses, which I find a bit strange.
Blue Group I thought may have been the easiest given that there is essentially nothing else a Gumshoe or Flatfoot is going to be. If you have watched any old movie or read any old book in this genre ever, I think there is little chance you wouldn’t get this one.
I have never been more confused than I was seeing “Chuck E. Cheese” in a puzzle, as there was no Kids’ Kingdom or Dave ‘N Busters to with it. I also do not know what a Hurly-Burly is, which is a Sean Penn movie and also a term for “noisy disorder” that I’m not sure anyone has ever used in history.
So, which of these tripped you up?
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