Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 10 for puzzle #548 are a rating. They seemed in the range of a 3. Today's ratings were not released in time for publication of today's answers.
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, #547, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #548. 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: Fish, Call, Wanda, Ran, Inland, Cruise, Fumble, Taxi, Touchdown, Dub, Olivia, Root, Name, Rummage, Takeoff, and Label.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Give a title to
- 🟩 Green: Parts of a flight
- 🟦 Blue: Feel around (for)
- 🟪 Purple: Countries minus first letter
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: Name a thing, fish around for more answers, enjoy your flight while visiting countries around the globe.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #548?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Give a little to: Call, dub, label, name
- 🟩 Parts of a flight: Cruise, takeoff, taxi, touchdown
- 🟦 Feel around (for): Fish, fumble, root, rummage
- 🟪 Countries minus first letter: Inland, Olivia, Ran, Wanda
I admit to struggling with today because I kept seeing the start of connections but finding that there wasn't anything there. An example was seeing Cruise and Touchdown, I was thinking of Toms (Tom Cruise and "Touchdown" Tom Brady). I had a lot of small two term groups going. Staying with Football, I was looking at touchdown, dub and fumble as possible terms, in another example.
My day started for real with the yellow category. I found name and label first. Call also worked but it took a moment for dub to click because I was thinking of it as the slang for a win, "getting the dub."
Root and rummage stuck out to me, and I liked fish as well. I didn't like fumble, because I thought it meant more hapless looking than the other three implied, but that's my internal definition I suppose.
We finally knocked out the green category with Cruise, takeoff, taxi and touchdown. Being stuck on football really delayed my thinking here.
And purple, my least favorite style of purple grouping where its a word minus a letter or group of letters. We have (F)inland, (B)olivia, (I)ran, and (R)wanda. I admit that my issue with this specific purple genre is that I never mentally reach that place of subtraction, instead I look at the word as it is to see how it connects to the other words in the puzzle with what's on the page and not what's missing or could be added. That is a me-problem. Perhaps you'll solve this one easier than I.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Deliberation: Consideration, Reflection, Scrutiny, Thought
- 🟩 Used in starting a fire: Flint, Lighter, Magnifying Glass, Matches
- 🟦 Used to view a biological sample: Microscope, Slide, Specimen, Stain
- 🟪 Words after 'X': Factor, Files, Games, Ray
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #547, which had a difficulty rating of 2.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Kicking off things with the easiest category always means things just get harder from here, but it didn't take much, er, scrutiny to realize the word was tied to Consideration, Reflection, and Thought.
Next came the green category with Flint, Lighter, Magnifying Glass, and Matches, which wasn't too difficult to suss out if you've ever been camping. Or, in my case, if you've seen enough horror movies about folks getting lost in the woods to recognize everything you need to start a fire (and to only do so at your own risk, because that is how the monsters find them like 90% of the time, after all).
I struck out a few times trying to dig through half-remembered lessons from high school biology class and connect Microscope and Slide with some other clues. But that science-y line did make me think of x-rays, which led to noticing that Factor, Files, Games, and Ray all took on a new meaning when preceded by the letter X.
That left only blue, and my instincts were proven correct that it was indeed biology 101 thingamajigs. I got Microscope, Slide, and Specimen, it was just Stain I was missing.
