An interesting Connections where two categories are close to identical, at least in terms of how they’re formatted.

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.

FEATURED | Frase By Forbes ™

Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase

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.

  • GRINCH
  • BEANSTALK
  • STAGE
  • LANYARD
  • HIGHTAIL
  • LEG
  • SOUNDTRACK
  • HOTFOOT
  • BEAT
  • STRETCH
  • FRIED
  • CHAMOMILE
  • SPENT
  • EYESHADOW
  • PHASE
  • WORN OUT

Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - FRIED
  • 🟢 Green Group - PHASE
  • 🔵 Blue Group - GRINCH
  • 🟣 Purple Group - HIGHTAIL

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Take a nap
  • 🟢 Green Group - Portion
  • 🔵 Blue Group - [Word]_____
  • 🟣 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 - Exhausted
  • 🟢 Green Group - Segment
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Ending in Units of Length
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Ending in Synonyms for Follow Secretly

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 - Exhausted (BEAT, FRIED, SPENT, WORN OUT)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Segment (LEG, PHASE, STAGE, STRETCH)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Ending in Units of Length (CHAMOMILE, GRINCH, HOTFOOT, LANYARD)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Ending in Synonyms for Follow Secretly (BEANSTALK, EYESHADOW, HIGHTAIL, SOUNDTRACK)

Well, Yellow Group sums up how I feel this Friday. Most Fridays. Most days, in fact, with two kids under four. I need about 40 hours of sleep but weekends are even busier, somehow.

Green Group wasn’t the hardest, given the grouping. Yes, there are alternate meanings for some, but overall you could cluster these pretty well.

Blue Group is the first of two that draw on the end of a word, and probably the easier of them. If you see words like Grinch with no other Christmas clues and Chamomile with no other tea clues, chances are you should be looking inside the word itself, and here we are.

Purple Group does the same thing, but with a harder category to recognize. Sure, when you see them all laid out with the category filled in, it makes sense, but before that, it would have been really hard to snatch this out of thin air.

Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , and Instagram .

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .