NYT Connections today hints and answers — Wednesday, April 9 (#668)

Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on April 9 for puzzle #668 are harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.8 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, #667, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #668. 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: Dog, Pop, Ball, Sock, Slug, Frog, Glove, Trot, Bat, Hound, Globe, Pound, Orb, Newt, Hole, and Sphere.

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

• 🟨 Yellow: Round three-dimensional objects
• 🟩 Green: Punch
• 🟦 Blue: Animals in the witches' brew in "Macbeth"
• 🟪 Purple: Fox ____

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: Get round in the fox hole with animals battling in Macbeth.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #668?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Round three-dimensional objects: Ball, globe, orb, sphere
• 🟩 Punch: Pop, pound, slug, sock
• 🟦 Animals in the witches' brew in "Macbeth": Bat, dog, frog, newt
• 🟪 Fox ____: Glove, hole, hound, trot

With the end of March Madness, I was thinking round ball rock and snatched up ball, globe, orb and sphere right away.

I was looking at hound and was reminded of The Fox and the Hound. Which led me to foxhound followed by other fox things; fox trot, foxglove and foxhole.

Took it easy with the green category snagging pop, pound, slug and sock.

And we wrapped it up with the witches brew of bat, dog, frog and newt from Macbeth.

Yesterday's Connections answers

• 🟨 Prick: Jab, pierce, poke, stick
• 🟩 Radio lingo: Copy, negative, over, roger
• 🟦 Old Testament books: Daniel, Job, Judges, Numbers
• 🟪 Words pronounced "Sh" without an "Sh": Sean, Siobahn, sugar, sure

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #667, which had a difficulty rating of 1.8 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

I don't know why but the sub-2 rated puzzles I never guess which category is which color correctly. They are all yellow at a certain point.

And yet, I went down the line. Which is largely due to how I play where I let categories come to me. I don't really try to specify purple first. I play this game with vibes, which probably isn't how you're supposed to do it.

Poke and jab stuck out to me first, and then we picked up pierce and jab.

Copy, negative and over shifted almost on top of each other, so I looked around for another radio term and found roger.

If you don't follow Christianity or Judaism, the blue category might be a little harder with books from the first testament. These were Daniel, Job, Judges and Numbers.

And we wrapped it up with words that have an "sh" sound when pronounced not when spelled: Sean, Siobahn, sugar and sure.