Today's NYT Connections: Hints To Help Solve Today's Game, June 1, 2024

Connections is approaching its first anniversary this June and remains one of The New York Times' most popular offerings, second only to Wordle. The puzzle challenges players to identify the strongest links between a group of words. The goal is to sort 16 words into four groups of four by identifying common threads — without making more than four mistakes.

If you're a new player, you might have noticed that the game often adds a fun (and sometimes frustrating) twist by having some words that seem to belong to more than one category. These are red herrings, and the game becomes more challenging as their number increases.

Today's game (Connections #356) has quite a few of those fishy additions, which explains its difficulty rating of 3 out of 5. If you're stuck in a rut, here's a guide to help you crack the code without (any more) mistakes. We've compiled some hints that'll help you arrive at the answers yourself, and if you prefer to cut to the chase, scroll to the bottom to see the solutions.

Each Connections puzzle features a 16-word grid from which you're supposed to make four groups of words that share something in common. Per the NYT itself, these categories typically involve trivia (like band names or famous artists) or the meaning and structure of words (like synonyms or homophones).

Each group is color-coded according to its difficulty level. The yellow group is the easiest and most obvious connection, green and blue are medium, and purple is the trickiest of the bunch — usually super-specific, abstract themes that might leave you scratching your head even after you've figured out the answers, but don't worry, that's the fun of it. Technically, you only need to figure out three groups — the fourth will naturally be left over after 12 words are eliminated. If you're finding it difficult to make a connection, you can shuffle the board to rearrange the words and make it easier to spot one.

Click on four words and hit Submit to see if you've guessed a group correctly. If you're right, those words will be removed from the board and displayed in a color-coded bar above, along with the key to the category. You might get a message telling you that you're one word away from a connection if you've selected three correct words, but it's up to you to figure out which one to swap. If you're wrong, that counts as a mistake, and players lose the game if they make four mistakes per game. The hints below might help you prevent that from happening.

Here are the 16 words on the grid for today's Connections #356:

• CURRENT

• LOCK

• CURL

• FLY

• PANE

• DRIFT

• PRESS

• HURRY

• WAVE

• RUSTLE

• STAT

• ROW

• TIDE

• PRONTO

• MARKS

• NOW

These hints might help you sort them correctly:

1. Yellow group: Waste no time with this guess.

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2. Green group: Surfer's turf.

3. Blue group: This one really works your arms out.

4. Purple group: Sounds like people who make you think.

The contents of today's categories are pretty true-to-code in their order of difficulty. The yellow group contains words that refer to doing stuff quickly; the green group is about things easy, breezy, and bright; when you get to blue, you really start to work up a sweat; and purple is an enigma that will make you roll your eyes, as always.

If you're still feeling stuck, we'll go ahead and reveal all four categories for today's Connections puzzle. Here they are:

1. Yellow group: "DON'T DELAY!"

2. Green group: OCEAN PHENOMENA

3. Blue group: DUMBBELL EXERCISES

4. Purple group: PHILOSOPHER HOMOPHONES

Does that help? If you're out of guesses, don't worry. You're not out of luck. See the section below for the answer reveal. If you'd rather not have the answers handed to you, this is the point where you stop scrolling — all the spoilers are ahead.

The answers to today's Connections puzzle are:

1. Yellow group: "Don't delay!" (HURRY, NOW, PRONTO, STAT)

2. Green group: Ocean phenomena (CURRENT, DRIFT, TIDE, WAVE)

3. Blue group: Dumbbell exercises (CURL, FLY, PRESS, ROW)

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4. Purple group: Philosopher homophones (LOCK, MARKS, PANE, RUSTLE)

There you have it! The green group was our first connection today, but we took the bait for the red herring with CURL, PRESS, and LOCK,  thinking they shared something hair-related in common. Hopefully, you made it to the finish line without too many mistakes.

We put these guides up every day so you can check back in whenever you get stuck on a puzzle. Here's yesterday's puzzle answers if you need to catch up. We also have a Wordle guide that might help you solve them more easily and a list detailing other games like Wordle if you're looking for something new. Till tomorrow, adios, sayonara, ciao, farewell!