Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 13 for puzzle #551 swings way back down to easy territory compared to yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.5 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #550, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #551. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
Today's Connections words are: Trash, Phish, Crush, Troll, Bore, Spam, Links, Squirt, Sprite, Towed, Giant, Drafts, Pixie, Sent, Starry and Dragon.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Fantasy creatures
- 🟩 Green: Email folders
- 🟦 Blue: Citrus sodas
- 🟪 Purple: Animal homophones
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Here's a larger hint: Pop a soda, read a fantasy novel, ignore your email and don't think about the band Phish.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #551?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Fantasy creatures: Dragon, giant, pixie, troll
- 🟩 Email folders: Drafts, sent, spam, trash
- 🟦 Citrus sodas: Crush, Sprite, Squirt, Starry
- 🟪 Animal homophones: Bore, Links, Phish, Towed
This week is wild between the first 1 rated puzzle I've ever seen to yesterday's pictorial puzzle and a giant swing back down to the 1s today.
I found today's 1.5 rated puzzle to be surprisingly easier than Wednesday's 1 rating.
Perhaps, I consume too many sodas but seeing Crush and Squirt was an immediate soda connection for me. Sprite could be grouped with Pixie but once you have soda it's an obvious one. Starry is less obvious but used to be called Sierra Mist (Pepsi's version of Sprite).
I saw the green category email folders of Drafts, Sent, Spam and Trash but assumed it was the yellow group so I skipped it to grab the fantasy creatures of Dragon, Giant, Pixie and Troll, which turned out to actually be the yellow group.
Chagrined, I nabbed the green words to wrap that up.
And then we end with animal homophones for bore (boar), links (lynx), phish (fish) and towed (toad). I had skipped some of these earlier looking for bands because of phish before seeing the homophone link.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Things that sound like "T": Tea, Tee(Golf), Tee (shirt), Ti (musical note)
- 🟩 Objects with teeth: Comb, gear, saw, zipper
- 🟦 Mild oaths: Fudge, geez, nuts, rats
- 🟪 Parts of a river: Band, bed, delta, mouth
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #550, which had a difficulty rating of 3.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I was legitimately stunned when I opened today's puzzle to see a bunch of pictures. I actually thought it was broken for a second. Between yesterday's 1 rated puzzle and today's much harder pictorial puzzle, Connections is taking us on a roller coaster this week.
I have complaints but you want answers, here's how I got them. Complaints at the end.
I saw the gear and immediately thought tooth. Zipper was next then saw and comb. Green down.
Purple came next only because I was saying out loud what I thought the picture was. It clicked when I said bank and bed followed by mouth. I was not actually sure if the triangle represented delta but none of the other images seemed to fit so it was a guess here that worked.
I had 3/4s of yellow with Tea and the two Tees but I can't read sheet music so that bar means nothing to me.
Blue was putting together the rest of the images minus the 3 Ts. Mild oaths indeed.
Thus we ended with yellow.
Briefly, here are my complaints, one) a couple friends noted that there was no alt text on this puzzle so anyone with impaired sight was out of luck with this one. A total bust and an unforced error. Braille readers can "see" the words on normal puzzles but not images.
And two) I just don't like pictogram puzzles like this. It's not my cup of tea, if you will. I prefer the nuance of words to the fumbling guessing of what part of the image you mean with picture puzzles. My personal hope is they don't do this again. And if they do, at least provide alt text for the those who may not be able to see the images as clearly.
