Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on June 8 for puzzle #728 are the same difficulty as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.5 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, #727, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #728. 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: Last, Bull, Born, Bred, Doe, Stand, Spouse, Bear, Education, Cache, Dove, Hold, Lute, Stay, Occupation, Hawk
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Persist
- 🟩 Green: Animal metaphors in economics
- 🟦 Blue: Sidebar info on a person's Wikipedia page
- 🟪 Purple: Homophones of slang for money
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: Invest, do a deep dive, and stick with it.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #728?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Persist: Hold, Stay, Stand, Last
- 🟩 Animal metaphors in economics: Bear, Bull, Dove, Hawk
- 🟦 Sidebar info on a person's Wikipedia page: Born, Education, Occupation, Spouse
- 🟪 Homophones of slang for money: Bred, Cache, Doe, Lute
Usually I never get the purple categories that involve homophones or "words minus a letter" kind of connections, so I was surprised to get it off the bat with today's puzzle. I saw a bunch of animal metaphors for types of markets (which would end up being the green category), and that had me thinking about money. Lute and Cache seemed to be outliers, but once I realized they're double-meaning, I took a stab with Doe and Bred.
Then I got green with Bear, Bull, Dove, and Hawk. I'd heard of all of them except Dove but it was the only remaining animal-themed clue left.
From there I started looking for synonyms in the remaining clues and got Hold, Last, Stand, and Stay for the yellow category.
That left blue as today's rote fill with Born, Education, Occupation, and Spouse.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Tips for working out safely: Breathe, hydrate, rest, stretch
- 🟩 Establish: Found, institute, launch, start
- 🟦 Ditty: Air, number, song, strain
- 🟪 Spring ____: Chicken, equinox, fling, onion
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #727, which had a difficulty rating of 2.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Despite the lower difficulty, I think this one might trip people up.
I nearly went down the line today but blue and purple got mixed up.
I kicked things off with breath, stretch and rest thinking it was yoga related. I supposed hydrate could be related to the practice but it works here.
Found and start leapt out next. Which led to launch and institute.
I had number, song and strain noted, but was not seeing the other music word.
Instead, spring fling came to mind while looking around the remaining words. This did open up the rest for me which led to spring chicken, spring equinox and spring onion.
This finally got me to air. Technically this relates to short bits of music and can be swapped in for ditty. It's a word I had forgotten and had to find in the thesaurus afterwards to remember.
Connections tips — how to win at Connections
There are two ways to play Connections, get the answers as you solve them or solve for the hardest group, Purple, first.
For either playstyle, the best tip I can give is to not be afraid of the shuffle button, especially if you’ve solved a set but you’re certain it isn’t the Purple group. You can shuffle the grid until your solved quartet is in a somewhat staked off area.
For the purple group, you can expect to see a handful of category types: words missing a letter, homophones, words with specific suffixes or prefixes, and [blank] word (or word [blank]). There are others but this is a majority of what you’ll see. It can help to look for purple connections through one of those lenses.
If you’re not hunting for purple specifically, then the best advice I have is to look for smaller connections. For example, Riddler and Joker are Batman villains. Once you’ve grouped that duo together it’s easier to find another set.
Finally, watch out for traps. Occasionally, the Connections makers like to throw in a set of words that should seem very obvious to most people. But picking them can give you a strike, something you want to save for when you aren’t really sure between a couple of clues.
The tricky bit is that sometimes the very obvious foursome is actually one of the answers (usually the yellow or green levels).
One way to work around this is to note the four clues you think are an obvious set. Highlight them by selecting the words but don’t hit submit. From there take a second look around the grid to see if anything else stands out to you.
Often these super obvious sets are actually individually spread out between the four groups. So, if you see Wick, Neo, Ted and Mnemonic, you might immediately think of Keanu Reeves movies, but it's a trick. Instead, use the individual words as launching points to discover other connections.
If you're new to the game you should also take a look at our How to play Connections guide.
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