Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on June 24 for puzzle #379 are a smidge easier than 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. 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, #378, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #379. 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: Sore to the Touch
- 🟩 Green: Restaurant Courses
- 🟦 Blue: Animal Homophones
- 🟪 Purple: Red ___
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: Today's puzzle has a couple of different treats on the menu, including things that sound like other things when spoken aloud, a certain color that's dripped into many common phrases, and some symptoms you may have described to your doctor.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #379?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Sore to the Touch: Delicate, raw, sensitive, tender
- 🟩 Restaurant Courses: Dessert, main, side starter
- 🟦 Animal homophones: Bare, dear, mousse, new
- 🟪 Red ___ : Carpet, delicious, meat, tape
Maybe it's because I just ate lunch, but it took me only a few seconds to parse the green category. The word "meat" feels like a red herring to distract from "main" and "side," both of which have multiple meanings but only one that slots in seamlessly with the likes of dessert and starter.
The yellow category was another quick fill. Raw and tender have enough in common to lump them together off the bat (though once again, "meat" had me second-guessing myself). Plucking at that thread further, I realized sensitive isn't that far off from either, which left only one option available with a passing resemblance: delicate.
Blue and purple is where I started to fumble and fumble hard. Today's purple category is all words linked to a common color. Red meat, red carpet and red tape are common enough, but red delicious, the name of a particular type of apple, is less so. Or perhaps I'm the outlier for not having enough of a preference to know the breeds of apple by name.
There's one word in the blue category that I have personal beef with. It's full of homophones, or words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings, related to animals. Bare (bear) and dear (deer) are clever, and I got to hand it to the Times for mousse (moose) because that one really threw me. But new? What in God's name is a new? Well, dear reader, after a quick Google search, I've learned gnu is another name for a wildebeest. But I'm still going to hold fast to my grudge, thank you very much. The next time I see a gnu, it's on sight.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #378, which had a difficulty rating of 3.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Sunday's puzzle was a trip down memory lane. The green category brought up memories of staying home sick as a kid watching the Price is Right with illness-related words like bug, chill, cold, and cough.
Staying with that theme, the yellow category was packed with exasperated callouts I remember all too well from growing up: easy, enough, quiet, and relax.
Blue brought in long-forgotten biology facts with words about what humpback whales do (i.e. breach, dive, sing, and spout).
Then purple brought us home, crisscrossing America with famous city monikers like magic, motor, sin, and windy.
