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

A bit of a tricky Connections today with a whole host of words that sound a bit similar, but of course they aren’t all grouped up.

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.

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.

  • SLEEPY
  • HONK
  • BOBBLE
  • GOBBLE
  • WARBLE
  • COBBLE
  • WOBBLE
  • TAR
  • PI
  • HAMMER
  • TODDLE
  • COO
  • SWAY
  • JUG
  • TORT
  • TOTTER

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - SWAY
  • 🟢 Green Group - COO
  • 🔵 Blue Group - BOBBLE
  • 🟣 Purple Group - PI

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Stay steady
  • 🟢 Green Group - Cheep cheep
  • 🔵 Blue Group - _____[word]
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Lose aletter

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Move Unsteadily
  • 🟢 Green Group - Bird Onomatopoeia
  • 🔵 Blue Group - _____Head
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Desserts Minus Last Letter

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 - Move Unsteadily (SWAY, TODDLE, TOTTER, WOBBLE)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Bird Onomatopoeia (COO, GOBBLE, HONK, WARBLE)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - _____Head (BOBBLE, HAMMER, JUG, SLEEPY)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Desserts Minus Last Letter (COBBLE, PIT, TAR, TORT)

Given that I actually have a toddler, Yellow Group tripped me up. I thought Toddle and Totter may be combined with Coo or Sleepy in terms of being baby words, but that was not the case, albeit the whole group is how toddlers move. I mean, that’s why they call them toddler.

Bird onomatopoeia, or rather, sounds birds make is Green Group. I haven’t really heard of a bird cooing before unless it’s…pigeons, maybe? Do pigeons coo? Also warble seems like a pretty limited range of birds who actually do that. Gobble and Honk, yeah, I got those.

Usually the blank then word groups are saved for purple group, but not this time. This is where we find Bobble, but the others are so disparate I had trouble putting them together. Jughead I only know from Archie or Riverdale and that’s it, and it was certainly not at the front of my mind.

Purple Group is a sweet one, though again tricky as you are just subtracting a single letter, and not the same letter, for the category. Cobbler, Pie, Tart and Torte are the ones you’re looking for. I don’t even like any of those except maybe Apple Pie, and that’s mainly only on holidays.

Which ones tripped you up today>?

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