Looking for Sunday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Hey there, Connectors! Welcome to the start of a new week. I hope you just had a mesmerizingly good weekend and that you’re ready to kick all kinds of butt.
As you may know by now, we like to kick off the Monday edition of the song with an upbeat song to hopefully get you moving a little and get those endorphins flowing. Dancing almost always makes you feel good.
After last week’s Depeche Mode pick, we’re going back to early ‘80s this time around with, in my opinion, the very best song by New Order. “Age of Consent” is impeccable in my book. That brilliant Peter Hook bass line drives through the entire song and those drums (which the band admitted to nicking from their former group Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”) never fail to at least get my toes tapping. Just maybe try not to give the lyrics too much attention if you’re trying to dance to this one:
Before we begin, I’ve set up a discussion group for NYT Connections and this column on Discord. We have a great little community over there and we chat about more than NYT games. Everyone who has joined has been lovely. It’s a fun hangout spot.
It’s also the best way to give me any feedback about the column, especially on the rare(!) occasions that I mess something up since I don’t look at the comments or Twitter much.
Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Monday, April 21, 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 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…
- CELL
- IRON
- TWIST
- SHEET
- SPRING
- WRENCH
- PROTEIN
- CORKSCREW
- DNA
- CURVEBALL
- COLUMN
- SODIUM
- BOMBSHELL
- ROW
- FAT
- FUSILLI
And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:
- Yellow group — like salt or sugar
- Green group — key moment in a story
- Blue group — you’ll need to be good at these if you want to excel
- Purple group — you might see one on a rollercoaster or in someone’s hair
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 — info on a nutritional label
- Green group — metaphor for something unexpected
- Blue group — things you insert into a spreadsheet
- Purple group — helical things
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 — info on a nutritional label (FAT, IRON, PROTEIN, SODIUM)
- Green group — metaphor for something unexpected (BOMBSHELL, CURVEBALL, TWIST, WRENCH)
- Blue group — things you insert into a spreadsheet (CELL, COLUMN, ROW, SHEET)
- Purple group — helical things (CORKSCREW, DNA, FUSILLI, SPRING)
That’s 55 wins in a row thanks to my latest perfect game. Neato. Here’s how I fared:
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
After a few moments of chin scratching, TWIST and BOMBSHELL made the greens pretty clear to me. With WRENCH out of the way, that freed up IRON to go with the yellows. I had suspected that WRENCH and IRON might be part of a group of board game pieces.
It was pretty academic from there. CORKSCREW and DNA made the purples fairly obvious. That left the blues for the win. You can have multiple SHEETs within a spreadsheet, so this all adds up.
That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog tomorrow for hints and the solution for Tuesday’s game if you need them.
P.S. A recent edition of Strands had “THE movies” as the clue, which reminded me of today’s recommendation. While it wasn’t quite as successful as their fantastic cover of “Smooth Criminal,” Alien Ant Farm’s “Movies” did pretty well for the band. It’s a fun song that I still enjoy.
The band are still going and they released their latest album last year. I haven’t head the whole thing but the few tracks that I have checked out have all been really good. I should probably give the record a spin (or, more accurately, fire it up on Apple Music). In any case, “Movies” is a real good time:
Have a great day! Stay hydrated! Call someone you love!
Please follow my blog for more coverage of NYT Connections and other word games, and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me out a lot! Sharing this column with other people who play Connections would be appreciated too. Also, follow me on Bluesky! It’s fun there.