NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, February 27 (#627)

Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on February 27 for puzzle #627 leap back up in difficulty compared to yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.3 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, #626, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #627. 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: Tissue, Ring, Bigfoot, Wheel, Thermometer, Horn, Phone, Organ, Cell, Instagram, Belt, Dial, Mirror, Call, Compound, and Atom.

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

• 🟨 Yellow: Contact via telephone
• 🟩 Green: Parts of a car
• 🟦 Blue: Levels of biological organization
• 🟪 Purple: Ending with units of measure

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: Recall your biology, mechanics, and ring up a friend for some baking.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #627?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Contact via telephone: Call, dial, phone, ring
• 🟩 Parts of a car: Belt, horn, mirror, wheel
• 🟦 Levels of biological organization: Atom, cell, organ, tissue
• 🟪 Ending with units of measure: Bigfoot, compound, instagram, thermometer

What stuck out to me was Instagram, perhaps obviously, so I started looking for apps like Phone and...thermometer? That one didn't work.

From there I did follow phone to call, ring and dial. I assumed that was the yellow and saved it.

What I actually started with was organ and tissue. From there I saw atom and cell and assumed biology. Close enough.

I saw horn and wheel and was thinking car. Horn followed but I wasn't clicking with belt for a moment.

So I hit bigfoot, compound, instagram, and thermometer as a stopgap. got it.

Then we wrapped up with green and followed with yellow.

Yesterday's Connections answers

• 🟨 Expenditure: Charge, cost, price, rate
• 🟩 Onetime: Former, late, past, prior
• 🟦 Made with horizontal lines: Dash, hyphen, minus, underscore
• 🟪 Simpson family members with first letter changed: Baggie, barge, comer, pisa

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #626, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

I try to start at purple on 2-rated puzzles but often overthink what ones they think are harder than the other.

Anyway, I started with past and prior which were for the green group and included former and late.

I noted charge, cost, price and rate as "expenditures" so I held that one thinking it was the yellow group (it was).

Instead, I went with dash, hyphen, minus and underscore as straight line punctuation, which I had thought was too obvious earlier.

This left the purple category with the second Simpsons category in as many weeks. We had Simpson names with one letter changed; Baggie (Maggie), Barge (Marge), Comer (Homer), and Pisa (Lisa).