Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on July 8 for puzzle #393 are significantly easier than yesterday's, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. 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, #392, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #393. 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: Bit of advice
- 🟩 Green: Fortitude
- 🟦 Blue: Spend time at
- 🟪 Purple: Words ending in numbers
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: Lot of red herrings in this one, but don't let your mind wander beyond the grave. Instead, think of local watering holes and the kind of chatter you'd overhear there.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #393?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Bit of advice: Pointer, suggestion, tip, trick
- 🟩 Fortitude: Grit, resolve, spirit, will
- 🟦 Spend time at: Frequent, haunt, patronize, visit
- 🟪 Words ending in numbers: Canine, freight, often, ozone
The obvious link between spirit and haunt almost threw me, but not this time Connections crew! In brainstorming other uses of haunt, the words patronize and visit all but jumped out at me followed soon after by frequent to round out the Blue category.
Next was Green. I connected grit and resolve right away. Then spirit came haunting back, and I realized they weren't talking about the kind in a sheet chasing Scooby-Doo. That only left will, which as it turns out, was not referencing a person's last will and testament. Look, there were a lot of spooky words in today's puzzle (freight gets an honorary mention), so I struggled to get my mind out of the graveyard, ok?
Yellow came together after that, with suggestion, tip, and trick being easy enough to spot. Pointer made me think of the dog breed, but its other meaning came to me once I got the other three.
The Purple category was downright diabolical today. With only four words left, I was still clueless how they were related...until the category popped up and I groaned. Each word ends in a number — caNINE, frEIGHT, get it? That's tough enough, but then you've got ozone. Ozone? A word where it's not even pronounced like the number? That's a low blow, Connections crew. I'm suing for emotional damages.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #392, which had a difficulty rating of 4.2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
That 4.2 rating was no joke: Yesterday's puzzle was a tough one. Words like suit, hero and vaporize had visions of Superman rattling around in my head, but that turned out to be a red herring. I forgot that vaporize isn't just reserved for laser eyes. However, once the high school science class definition came back to me, the other three in Yellow — condense, freeze, and melt — fell into place.
Green was a little more straightforward. First I clocked the connection between alternate and backup, which then led me to sub. It took me longer to figure out that the fourth was cover (I suspect I wasn't entirely free of my superhero line of thinking yet).
Blue came together nicely after that. Once I realized suit meant the boring Wall Street kind and not the emblemed spandex kind, shrink jumped out to me immediately. Hack came after, but then I struggled yet again with the fourth. The Yellow category got me thinking about science, so it took a second to remember copper meant anything other than what pennies are made of.
Purple was a rote fill, which worked out great for me because the only Mariah Carey song I know off the top of my head is "All I Want for Christmas Is You."
