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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Scott Younker

Today's NYT Connections hints and answers — Tuesday, June 25, #380

NYT Connections.

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on June 25 for puzzle #380 are slightly harder than yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.2 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #379, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #380. 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.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

  • 🟨 Yellow: Divulge, as private information
  • 🟩 Green: Divide
  • 🟦 Blue: Silent "K"
  • 🟪 Purple: Keys to success, so to speak

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: Today's puzzle seems to be about gossip. It can involve spilling the beans, which might disunite a group. Or there are silent letters that might hide the way to a greater fortune. Or it's Tuesday, Lemon.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #380?

Drumroll, please...

  • 🟨 Divulge, as private information: Dish, spill, talk, tell
  • 🟩 Divide: Branch, fork, part, split
  • 🟦 Silent "K": Doorknob, knife, topknot, unknown
  • 🟪 Key to success, so speak: Formula, recipe, secret, ticket

There's a podcast called "Normal Gossip" that I listen to from time to time, perhaps that was on the mind as I started today's puzzle. It really felt like many of the words could be connected to gossip or related to talking about gossip. 

Of course, that starts with the yellow category which was a quick get featuring "dish", "spill", and "talk". I was hesitant on "tell" if only because it seemed too similar to "talk", and not just as a connection. 

It took a few moments to find the green category. I saw "branch" and "fork" right away but was dungeon delving for "secret" which isn't correct. "Part" and "split jumped out almost immediately once I stopped playing DnD. 

Perhaps I am dumb but I saw the words for the blue category but did not make the silent connection. Instead, I just saw that each word had the letters K and N next to each other. It worked but it's not a great way to do these puzzles.

Purple was a perfunctory fill after that. I had seen formula and recipe early on but wasn't finding matches. Because of that I was looking for other connections that would split those two words up. It's probably good I saved them for secret and ticket to find success.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #378, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

Maybe it's because I just ate lunch, but it took me only a few seconds to parse the green category. The word "meat" feels like a red herring to distract from "main" and "side," both of which have multiple meanings but only one that slots in seamlessly with the likes of dessert and starter. 

The yellow category was another quick fill. Raw and tender have enough in common to lump them together off the bat (though once again, "meat" had me second-guessing myself). Plucking at that thread further, I realized sensitive isn't that far off from either, which left only one option available with a passing resemblance: delicate. 

Blue and purple is where I started to fumble and fumble hard. Today's purple category is all words linked to a common color. Red meat, red carpet and red tape are common enough, but red delicious, the name of a particular type of apple, is less so. Or perhaps I'm the outlier for not having enough of a preference to know the breeds of apple by name. 

There's one word in the blue category that I have personal beef with. It's full of homophones, or words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings, related to animals. Bare (bear) and dear (deer) are clever, and I got to hand it to the Times for mousse (moose) because that one really threw me. But new? What in God's name is a new? Well, dear reader, after a quick Google search, I've learned gnu is another name for a wildebeest. But I'm still going to hold fast to my grudge, thank you very much. The next time I see a gnu, it's on sight. 

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