Today’s Connections is one of those puzzles where you can feel your brain “locking in” on the wrong pattern—especially with the purple category. The good news: once you align each group to its theme, the whole board starts to click. Here are spoiler-forward hints that should steer you to the right ideas fast.
Hints
Start with the easiest yellow set if you want momentum. The theme there is about getting back in touch—think of phrases you’d use when following up after not hearing back.
The green group is more about how things are done, in a social sense. Not laws exactly, not always official rules—more like what people expect as standard behavior.
Blue feels literal, but not in a “wordplay” way. Look for places where people and items move along in a continuous flow—venues where there’s a conveyor belt vibe.
And then there’s purple, the tough one: sounds like… categories. In this set, the answers are built by pairing a word/phrase with a famous first name sound-alike (homophones). Once you spot the name sound in your head, the rest falls into place.
If you’re bouncing between groups and want extra backup beyond these hints, puzzle solving help for Today’s NYT can be useful for building intuition about theme-driven categories.
Answers
Yellow (reach back out): check in, follow up, reconnect, touch base
Green (the way things are done): convention, custom, social norm, unwritten rule
Blue (places with conveyor belts): assembly line, baggage claim, checkout lane, revolving sushi bar
Purple (sounds like…): carry-on (Carrie), El Niño (Elle), loosey-goosey (Lucy), tailor-made (Taylor)
A quick solving tip for puzzles like this: when you hit a category that feels “almost right,” pause and ask what kind of relationship it is—synonym/phrase, literal setting, or sound-alike. Today’s purple in particular is much easier once you commit to the homophone mechanism.
