Looking for the latest answers? Head here. We cover the hints for today’s Connections, plus the usual daily lineup—the Mini Crossword, Wordle that Sports Edition thing, Strands.
Today’s puzzle isn’t easy.
The green category makes you chuckle, really, while the purple one feels like it was designed specifically to frustrate you. Keep reading if you need the clues and the answers for Connections.
There’s a bot for this now, like there is for Wordle. Play the game then hit that bot for a numeric score. Let the machine analyze your moves. If you’re registered with the Games section you can really dig into the data: number of puzzles finished, your win rate, how often you got every single square right, and your current streak.
Hints, Tips and Strategies
Hints
Here are four clues, ordered by how hard they hit. Yellow is easiest, purple is brutal, occasionally bizarre.
- Yellow: Seas.
- Green: That stinks.
- Blue: Conservatory is another example.
- Purple: Not MA, though it’s close.
The Answers
Yellow group: Oceans.
Green group: Things with a strong scent.
Blue group: Rooms found in a big house.
Purple group: Things “PA” could stand for.
Wordle Cheat Sheet: Common English Letters
Yellow: The Water Groups
Oceans.
Four words. Arctic. Atlantic. Pacific. Southern. Straightforward stuff if you know geography, though Southern Ocean trips people up sometimes. It exists, even if you never went to school with it.
Green: Nose Trouble
Smells. Not the nice ones.
Ammonia. BO. Durian. Wet dog.
You’ve probably encountered the smell of ammonia if you clean your house, and most of us know exactly what BO feels like when you wake up too close to someone. Durian is the fruit that gets banned in hotels and airports because the air just can’t handle it, and a wet dog smells like wet dog—soggy, musky, distinct.
Blue: Mansion Rooms
Spaces inside a wealthy person’s home.
Billiard. Drawing. Powder. Reading.
The “drawing” room is archaic now, which is fair. “Powder” room makes sense once you accept people used to put on powder before selfies were possible, and the rest are pretty self-explanatory places to kill time.
Purple: The Acronym Trap
PA.
What else is PA?
Pennsylvania is obvious enough, sure, and father is a common enough nickname, but protactinium is chemistry you probably haven’t used since 2012, and “public address” pulls you in the direction of loudspeakers.
Father, Pennsylvania, Protactinium, Public address.
It works out eventually, mostly by elimination, but it requires sitting on a decision until you realize geography isn’t the only game in town.
Sometimes you just stare at the board and wait for it to make sense, which rarely happens quickly anyway.
