Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 21 for puzzle #559 swings way back up into hard compared to yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 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, #558, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #559. 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: Band, Sleigh, Baloney, Pan, Bunk, Grouch, Circle, Canopy, O, Statuette, Pot, Ring, Murphy, Casserole, and Hoop.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Loop
- 🟩 Green: Cooking vessels
- 🟦 Blue: Kinds of beds
- 🟪 Purple: Things called "Oscar"
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: Save Sesame Street, after getting out of bed and cooking up a ring of eggs.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #559?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Loops: Band, circle, hoop, ring
- 🟩 Cooking vessels: Casserole, crock, pot, pan
- 🟦 Kinds of beds: Bunk, canopy, murphy, sleigh
- 🟪 Things called "Oscar": Baloney, Grouch, O, Statuette
Back into the threes we go. How'd we fare?
I initially started with what I thought was a beds category having seen murphy. A relative of mine is obsessed with putting Murphy beds everywhere, so I am familiar with that. Bunk stuck out from there but for some reason I got distracted by casserole and crock. My thought was cooking vessels but I didn't quite believe that pan or pot would be involved, I was looking for more named things. Anyway, I put pot and pan with the other two and got the green category.
I took down the yellow quartet next mostly because it was in my way. Band, circle, ring, hoop.
Finally, I came back to beds with canopy and sleigh. Sleigh is the tricky one here I think, but maybe I'm wrong as I don't think people really have sleigh beds anymore.
And we ended with things named Oscar; baloney, Grouch, O and statuette.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Concoction: Cocktail, compound, mixture, solution
- 🟩 Types of sentences: Command, exclamation, question, statement
- 🟦 Kinds of bros: Crypto, Finance, Pharma, Tech
- 🟪 Complaint homophones: Grown, mown, whale, wine
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #558, which had a difficulty rating of 1.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
After a solid week of 3-rated puzzles, Friday takes a break with a 1.5 rating. How easy was it? Let's find out.
I attempted to go down the line today so we kicked it off with concoctions having seen cocktail and mixture. Pharma had me thinking medicinally which led to compound and solution.
The grid shift such that exclamation, command and statement were in a diagonal. Picked up question to wrap up the green quartet.
Here is messed up my attempt to go down the line. I legitimately thought the worst kind of people was going to be the purple group. So I grabbed what I thought were the remaining four and ended up getting purple early. We had homophones grown (groan), mown (moan), whale (wail), and wine (whine).
Thus we ended with the bros; crypto, finance, pharma and tech. I thought pharma bro was new to me until I remembered Martin Shkreli, who, to be fair, is essentially an amalgamation of all the mentioned terrible bros.
