NYT 'Connections' Hints And Answers For Sunday, December 8 ...

9 days ago

Forbes

Find the links between the words to win today's game of Connections.

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Looking for Saturday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:

ForbesNYT ‘Connections’ Hints And Answers For Saturday, December 7By Kris Holt

Hey there! I hope you’re having an excellent weekend.

I’ll admit, sometimes I’m of a mind to keep this section very brief, especially if I’m feeling lazy. But some of you have told me you come to the column just to read this bit, which always inspires me to write a little something. It makes me feel like we’ve got a nice little community going here, you know?

Speaking of which, in case you’re unaware, I recently started a little group on Discord where a few of us chat about each day’s game. I’ve really enjoyed that so far. It’s been nice getting to know those folks a bit and to see how they piece together each game. Anyway, sometime in January, I’ll open the doors and start sharing the link in the column every day so anyone who wants to join us can do just that.

Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, December 8, are coming right up.

How To Play Connections

Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day. You can play on the NYT website or Games app.

You’re presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.

There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.

Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.

Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.

If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.

If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the publication’s Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.

Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints for each grid via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.

Today’s 16 words are...

SANDWICH CATERPILLAR SHOEHORN SEOUL SLUG WRAP WEDGE SOCK PUMA BELT METTLE DOVE INDY GREYHOUND BLOW SQUEEZE

And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:

Yellow group — it's a hit! Green group — stuff Blue group — "fox" and "jaguar" would fit in here Purple group — musical soundalikes What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Need some extra help?

Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.

Today’s Connections groups are...

Yellow group — punch Green group — cram Blue group — companies named after animals Purple group — homophones of music genres What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections answers.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections answers are...

Yellow group — punch (BELT, BLOW, SLUG, SOCK) Green group — cram (SANDWICH, SHOEHORN, SQUEEZE, WEDGE) Blue group — companies named after animals (CATERPILLAR, DOVE, GREYHOUND, PUMA) Purple group — homophones of music genres (INDY, METTLE, SEOUL, WRAP)

It's always nice to get a perfect game. That's 11 wins in a row for me. Here's how I fared:

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My first thought was that SEOUL had to go with the purple group since there was clearly some wordplay going on. Nothing else really made sense as a city/town name except for SANDWICH, which is linked to the naming of the very best way to eat anything.

SOCK unlocked the yellows for me, so I squared those away. With SLUG out of the picture, I grouped up the remaining animal names and that was enough for the blues — even though I didn't make the specific connection.

Sometimes it helps to sound out words in the grid, especially because I was so sure SEOUL was in there as a soundalike. But uh, I didn't do that. Even though it would have made the purple group clearer.

I saw five possibilities for what I thought would be the greens. WRAP didn't quite fit and it seemed the likeliest candidate for a homophone, so I ruled that out from the greens. Still, because I like to get the purples as early as possible, I submitted those first.

For the sake of clarity, the purples refer to indie, metal, soul and rap.

That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Monday’s game if you need them.

P.S. Given my clue for the yellows and the fact We Are Scientists are an indie band, I have to go with this song. I deeply love their first album, With Love and Squalor, and this is perhaps my favorite song on it. It's so dang catchy!

Have a great day! Call someone you love!

If you’re so inclined, please do follow my blog for more coverage of Connections and other word games and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me out a lot! Also, follow me on Bluesky! It’s fun there.