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

Certainly not the hardest Connections today, and it’s kind of a speed run, actually.

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.

  • OUTLINE
  • SHADOW
  • FEED
  • FIGURE
  • DRAFT
  • IMAGINE
  • KICK
  • NOTIFICATIONS
  • GATHER
  • NOTES
  • UN
  • MESSAGES
  • BEAT
  • SUPPOSE
  • PROFILE
  • THESIS

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - OUTLINE
  • 🟢 Green Group - IMAGINE
  • 🔵 Blue Group - FEED
  • 🟣 Purple Group - KICK

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Helpful for a task
  • 🟢 Green Group - You think you know
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Zuckerberg’s domain
  • 🟣 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 - Useful when writing a paper
  • 🟢 Green Group - Presume
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Social Media Sections
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ______ Boxing

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:

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Useful when writing a paper (DRAFT, NOTES, OUTLINE, THESIS)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Presume (FIGURE, GATHER, IMAGINE, SUPPOSE)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Social Media Sections (FEED, MESSAGES, NOTIFICATIONS, PROFILE)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ______ Boxing (BEAT, KICK, SHADOW, UN)

So yeah, not the hardest today. I started with Blue Group rather than Green or Yellow like usual. I suppose that’s because I am online way too much and all of these came into my head immediately. Twitter is my network of choice these days and it has all of these. With 950,000 followers needless to say I do not check my notifications much any more.

Green Group is pretty basic and a lot of these don’t really have any alternate meanings that make any sense for the puzzle, so it was not terribly difficult to put these four together.

I have written five books so I have gone through at least three of these, as my fiction does not need a Thesis, per se. But a draft? Of course. Notes? Sure. An Outline? Well, sometimes, but it’s mostly just in my head.

Then we have our purple blank word section, which uses the weird Un clue to pair with the other three for the set of words. I wouldn’t have gotten this one on its own, but the other three were so easy that I got it by default this time.

Which of these tripped you up this week?

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