Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
I’ll be honest, this is one of the hardest Connections I’ve played in some time, and I think you’ll need some help with this one, as you may not know a bunch of these words. I didn’t.
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.
- SPLASH
- SALTY DOG
- RAW
- BITTER MELON
- SOURSOP
- DROP
- SKIPPER
- SWEETHEART
- SWAB
- CHAYOTE
- PLEA
- DAB
- DURIAN
- BIG
- TAR
- TOUCH
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – DROP
- 🟢 Green Group – SKIPPER
- 🔵 Blue Group – BITTER MELON
- 🟣 Purple Group – PLEA
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Tiny
- 🟢 Green Group – All hands on deck
- 🔵 Blue Group – Exotic edibles
- 🟣 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 – Little Bit
- 🟢Green Group – Sailor
- 🔵 Blue Group – Tropical Fruits/Vegetables
- 🟣 Purple Group – ____ Deal
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 – Little Bit (DAB, DROP, SPLASH, TOUCH)
- 🟢Green Group – Sailor (SALTY DOG, SKIPPER, SWAB, TAR)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Tropical Fruits/Vegetables (BITTER MELON, CHAYOTE, DURIAN, SOURSOP)
- 🟣 Purple Group – ____ Deal (BIG, PLEA, RAW, SWEETHEART)
Wow, what a puzzle. Yellow Group was the easiest, albeit most of those are usually thought of as verbs rather than nouns like they are here. You’ll have to put that together in order to assemble the group, and it’s less tricky than the others.
I did in fact realize that they were doing something seafaring with Green Group, but the problem was, even if I got SALTY DOG, SKIPPER and SWAB as ship roles, I had no idea that TAR was in that list, and if you cannot get all four, you’re obviously out of luck. It’s yet another piece of slang for a sailor, it turns out, originated from tarred clothing sailors wore.
Blue Group is where things go off the rails as I did not know CHAYOTE, DURIAN and SOURSOP at all. I’m not a chef. I don’t study Amazonian flora. I don’t know these things at all. Obviously BITTER MELON could be nothing but a fruit, but digging out these other words if you don’t know your exotic fruits and vegetables was incredibly difficult.
Purple Group, somehow, was probably the easiest today. You have to assume half the time that Purple is ____ [something], so that could get you the group if you put that together, as these aren’t the least common phrases. SWEETHEART really through me though, as that was initially hard to connect to anything else at all/
How did you fare today? Tough puzzle, right?
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