Hints, clues and answers for today’s Connections are here.
Looking for Saturday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
I returned from my adventures in Scotland and Ireland a week ago and while I felt pretty good the next day after my 23-hour travel day, I’ve definitely been a bit jet-lagged all week long. Or else I’m just getting old. But with age comes wisdom, or whatever you want to call it. If nothing else, I’ve definitely improved my puzzle-solving skills over the years! That comes with the territory, I suppose. When you write puzzle-solving guides, you have to get good at this stuff. In any case, my dearest Connectioneers, we have some word associations to make and a Connections to solve. Let’s do it!
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.
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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.
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.
Today’s Connections
- LAST
- BULL
- BORN
- BRED
- DOE
- STAND
- SPOUSE
- BEAR
- EDUCATION
- CACHE
- DOVE
- HOLD
- LUTE
- STAY
- OCCUPATION
- HAWK
Hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡Yellow group – Words about not giving up.
- 🔵Blue group – Information headings about a person’s life.
- 🟢Green group – Creatures that describe markets.
- 🟣Purple group – Sounds like $$$
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow group – Persist.
- 🔵Blue group– Sidebar on a person’s Wikipedia page.
- 🟢Green group – Animal metaphors in economics.
- 🟣Purple group – Homophones of slang for money.
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 – Hold, Last, Stand, Stay
- 🔵Blue group – Born, Education, Occupation, Spouse
- 🟢Green group – Bear, Bull, Dove, Hawk
- 🟣Purple group – Bred, Cache, Doe, Lute
Today’s Connections answers
It’s funny, I was actually pretty sure of the Green group first today, but I held off to see if I was right about other words first. It was the words LAST and STAND that made me try grouping these with HOLD and STAY, all words that indicate persistence or making a LAST STAND. Then I thought about the word DOE which was the only other animal word that wasn’t part of something I assumed was describing markets (as in a BULL or BEAR market). What made this one animal stand out? I saw BRED and thought maybe BRED and DOE were actually BREAD and DOUGH, and immediately thought this group might be about baking. But when I noticed CACHE and LUTE I realized this was actually about CASH and LOOT – aka, words that sounded like money words. So I plugged these in and got Purple on my second try. From here I went ahead with my earliest grouping and that just left Blue: BORN, EDUCATION, SPOUSE, OCCUPATION – all words about aspects of a person’s life. This was the least obvious group for me today, and I didn’t even consider it was a Wikipedia sidebar. All told, while not the hardest Connections I’ve played, a decent challenge nonetheless.
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