Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Not the hardest Connections today, but how you perform is going to be one tricky category testing your knowledge of something from a very specific decade.
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.
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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.
- CURE
- TIN
- BOTTOM
- SALT
- LOBSTER
- FOLD
- FALL
- DRY
- BUCKET
- CLASH
- PRESS
- DRUM
- WASH
- CAN
- DAMNED
- MUSIC
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – CAN
- 🟢 Green Group – FOLD
- 🔵 Blue Group – CURE
- 🟣 Purple Group – SALT
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Something to hold
- 🟢 Green Group – Someone else can clean it
- 🔵 Blue Group – Rock out
- 🟣 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 – Containers
- 🟢Green Group – Laundry Services
- 🔵 Blue Group – British Bands Formed in the 1970s With “The”
- 🟣 Purple Group – Rock ____
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 – Containers (BUCKET, CAN, DRUM, TIN)
- 🟢Green Group – Laundry Services (DRY, FOLD, PRESS, WASH)
- 🔵 Blue Group – British Bands Formed in the 1970s With “The” (CLASH, CURE, DAMNED, FALL)
- 🟣 Purple Group – Rock ____ (BOTTOM, LOBSTER, MUSIC, SALT)
I got Yellow Group second today, as TIN and CAN seem like they go together as one word, but they also work separately for the the puzzle. BUCKET is one of those words that doesn’t have two meanings. DRUM has at least three, but one of them does fit here.
Green Group, as it often is, was relatively easy today. I suppose putting IRON instead of PRESS would have been even easier, but the rest of it all lines up pretty quickly, and it’s something that we all do with our clothes. Well, maybe some people don’t press. Or some people don’t fold and just throw their clothes in a pile. I was in college once, too.
Blue Group, I would argue, is the hardest one today. It’s a hyper specific category of British rock bands from a specific decade. I obviously know The Clash and The Cure, but I have genuinely never heard of The Damned or The Fall. Granted I wasn’t even close to alive during this period of time. This was tough for me.
Purple Group is yet another Word then Blank clue set, as tends to be the case probably 20% of the time, at the very least. MUSIC would connect to the British Bands puzzle. I definitely thought of a LOBSTER BUCKET initially. FALL and BOTTOM could go together. So yeah, not the easiest.
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