Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:

Pretty easy Connections today and the NYT went a bit over the top with Purple Group, making it a lot more complicated than it needed to be.

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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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.

  • STILL
  • STILTS
  • SLINKY
  • AARDVARK
  • WOODY
  • GLASSY
  • CANNON
  • BOCCE
  • EBBING
  • BO PEEP
  • FLAT
  • UNICYCLE
  • CALM
  • JESSIE
  • TRAPEZE
  • TWIDDLE

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - CANNON
  • 🟢 Green Group - CALM
  • 🔵 Blue Group - WOODY
  • 🟣 Purple Group - BOCCE

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - The big top
  • 🟢 Green Group - No broken surface tension
  • 🔵 Blue Group - You’ve got a friend in me
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Check out the letters

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Circus Equipment
  • 🟢 Green Group - Undisturbed, as Water
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Toy Story Characters
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Double Letters Appearing In That Letter’s Alphabetical Position

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 - Circus Equipment (CANNON, STILTS, TRAPEZE, UNICYCLE)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Undisturbed, as Water (CALM, FLAT, GLASSY, STILL)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Toy Story Characters (BO PEEP, JESSIE, WOODY, SLINKY)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Double Letters Appearing In That Letter’s Alphabetical Position (AARDVARK, BOCCE, EBBING, TWIDDLE)

Yellow group was the one I got last, but not because it was hard, necessarily, but because everything else was pretty easy. I haven’t been to a real circus ever, really only seeing them in movies. I’m just not going to count Cirque du Soleil since no one was getting shot out of cannons or riding unicycles there.

Green Group is a relaxing look at a body of water, almost assuredly a lake or pond, given that you are never going to see a river that still and certainly not the ocean unless you’re way out in the middle with no breeze. Even then, probably not.

Blue Group assumes that some people in the world have not see one of the most famous children’s movies of all time, Toy Story. Well, technically you also need to see Toy Story 2 where they boot out Bo Peep and introduce Jessie. Slinky is also sort of a background character.

Purple Group? Trying too hard. The double letters are placed where that letter is in the alphabet, in that word, so AA is 1, BB is 2, CC 3, DD 4. But you could just…recognize that they were doing A through D, and the only one I considered being there otherwise before I knew that was cannon. The other ones, and I suppose there are a lot of double letters, were already done.

Which ones tripped you up today?

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