Hints and answers for today's Connections
Today’s Connections Cheat – Unlimited guesses
Use as many guesses as you need until you solve today’s Connections. Unlike the New York Times, you never run out of lives. Then you can play your answers on the NYT website.
Stuck on today’s Connections? The hints above are organised by colour group, from Yellow through to Purple, and you can reveal as much or as little as you want. No spoilers appear until you ask for them.
How the Game Works
Connections presents a four-by-four grid of sixteen words or phrases that you must sort into four groups of four, each sharing a common thread. The groups are colour-coded by difficulty. Yellow is the most accessible, where the connection is usually clear once you spot it. Green and Blue sit in the middle, typically involving trivia, wordplay, or cultural references that require a moment’s thought. Purple is the hardest, and where most streaks come to an end.
The game only allows four mistakes before it ends. That sounds generous until you discover that several words on the board are designed to fit plausibly into more than one category. A word that seems to anchor your most obvious group may belong somewhere else entirely. The starting grid is deliberately arranged to misdirect, with words placed to suggest groupings that turn out to be wrong.
The Best Advice for Solving Connections
Wyna Liu’s own best piece of advice is to wait as long as possible before guessing. You may look at the board and feel certain you’ve identified a category, only to find you can see five words that could belong to it. Don’t guess yet. Try to identify another group first, because doing so often removes the word that was creating the ambiguity.
The Purple category deserves special attention. Purple categories often hinge on clever twists: words that sound like letters, phrases that complete a specific idiom, or terms that belong to an unexpectedly narrow technical field.
If you’re completely stuck on Purple, there is a legitimate strategy available: get the other three groups right and Purple solves itself by elimination.
One other trap to watch for is the obvious group. Liu seeds the grid with red herrings, placing words near each other to suggest a grouping that turns out to be wrong. A word that looks like it obviously belongs to a fruit group might actually be part of a tech companies category. If a group feels too easy, check every word in it against the rest of the board before committing.
Using This Page
This page has two tools to help you with today’s Connections. The first is the hints section at the top, where you can click each colour group to reveal hints and answers at your own pace. For each group you can reveal a general hint, the category name, and then each of the four answers individually, one at a time. Nothing is shown until you click.
The second tool is the unlimited guesses game below, which lets you work through today’s puzzle without any lives limit. Unlike the New York Times version, you will never run out of guesses here, which makes it a good way to test your thinking before committing your answers on the official site.
For more Connections, visit our NYT Connections archive for all past answers. For more daily puzzles, check out our hints for today’s Wordle, today’s Spelling Bee, and today’s Strands.