Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on June 26 for puzzle #381 are just a smidge harder than yesterday's answers, 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. 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, #380, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #381. 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: Army ranks
- 🟩 Green: Place to plug something in
- 🟦 Blue: Consumer desire, collectively
- 🟪 Purple: ___ Ad
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 is all about marketing. Try not to get distracted by ads or you could get your wires crossed. Also, with July 4th fast approaching, one of the categories is a timely salute to the armed services.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #381?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Army ranks: Captain, general, major, private
- 🟩 Places to plug something in: Jack, outlet, port, socket
- 🟦 Consumer desire, collectively: Appetite, audience, demand, market
- 🟪 ___ Ad: Attack, personal, pop-up, want
I'm from a huge Navy town (shoutout to the 757!), so the yellow category in today's puzzle should have been a breeze for me. But seeing the word "private" alongside ones like "public" and "audience" must have short-circuited something in my brain, because I spent ages looking for the fourth answer after getting "general," "captain," and "major" before it hit me.
Purple fell into place surprisingly easily, as "pop-up" was a dead giveaway. Once that got me thinking about advertisements, "attack" seemed obvious, and then "personal" and "want" followed nicely.
Green really threw me for a loop. At first, I thought it might be related to tools with "jack" and "socket." But once I realized "outlet" and "port" had nothing to do with "audience" or "market," it finally came to me: It has to deal with plugs! Not people!
That only left Blue. I'd connected the aforementioned "audience" and "market" already, so with only "appetite" and "demand" remaining, it became clear that the advertisement theme of today's puzzle went further than I expected.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #380, which had a difficulty rating of 3.2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
There's a podcast called "Normal Gossip" that I listen to from time to time, perhaps that was on the mind as I started today's puzzle. It really felt like many of the words could be connected to gossip or related to talking about gossip.
Of course, that starts with the yellow category which was a quick get featuring "dish", "spill", and "talk". I was hesitant on "tell" if only because it seemed too similar to "talk", and not just as a connection.
It took a few moments to find the green category. I saw "branch" and "fork" right away but was dungeon-delving for "secret" which isn't correct. "Part" and "split jumped out almost immediately once I stopped playing DnD.
Perhaps I am dumb but I saw the words for the blue category but did not make the silent connection. Instead, I just saw that each word had the letters K and N next to each other. It worked but it's not a great way to do these puzzles.
Purple was a perfunctory fill after that. I had seen formula and recipe early on but wasn't finding matches. Because of that I was looking for other connections that would split those two words up. It's probably good I saved them for secret and ticket to find success.
