Today’s Connections is the kind of puzzle that makes you pause and stare at the board for a second. Instead of a single neat theme, you’re hunting for “hidden” relationships—words tucked inside four unrelated strings—plus one extra-bizarre purple category. The good news: once you lock onto each group’s idea, the rest gets surprisingly smooth.
Hints
Yellow (easiest): Think of something that looks bright or flashes—an effect you can almost hear in your head.
Green: These are bodily reactions you don’t choose, the kind that happen before you can talk yourself out of them.
Blue: The theme is knots—specifically, different ways to tie or name them.
Purple (toughest): Look for words that refer to competitions, but with a twist: the answers start with the same “units” language.
If you’re solving and want a sanity check as you go, remember that Connections bot feedback and stats can be surprisingly helpful for learning how your own guesses tend to cluster (especially on the purple category). For more general puzzle-solving help, keeping track of which substrings you’ve already tested can prevent repeated dead ends.
Answers
Yellow — Glimmer: flicker, hint, suggestion, whiff
Green — Involuntary actions: blink, hiccup, shiver, sneeze
Blue — Kinds of knots: bend, bowline, hitch, sheepshank
Purple — Starting with units in competitions: gamelan, matchstick, pointer, setback
Puzzle tip for next time: when you hit a purple category like this one, slow down and look for the “meta” clue first (here, competition-related units). Then work forward into what that would suggest for starting letters or embedded terms. That mental pivot is usually the difference between brute-forcing substrings and snapping to the right answers.
