Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answer on January 5 for puzzle #939 is a lot harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 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.
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: Brutal, Impression, Very, Real, Like, Manner, Pole, Post, Five, Versus, Extreme, End, Opposite, Comment, Lurky, and Volt
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Things you can do on social media
- 🟩 Green: Furthest point
- 🟦 Blue: Art movements with "-ism"
- 🟪 Purple: What V might mean
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: Subscribe to draw letters far away from me.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #939?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Things you can do on social media: Comment, Like, Lurk, Post
- 🟩 Furthest point: End, Extreme, Opposite, Pole
- 🟦 Art movements with "ism": Brutal, Impression, Manner, Real
- 🟪 What 'V' might mean: Five, Versus, Very, Volt
As a frequent Reddit lurker, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw the Lurk clue. I poked around for more terminally online words and picked up Comment, Like, and Post for yellow.
The Five stuck out to me as the only number on the board, so I started brainstorming what else it could be besides a number, like a Roman numeral. With that in mind, Versus started to make sense. I lumped in Volt and thought I might strike out with Very since it's slang but ended up solving purple.
I scanned for synonyms and picked up End, Extreme, Opposite, and Pole for green.
That left Brutal, Impression, Manner, and Real as today's rote fill. I can already hear my art teacher shaking her head at me for missing that connection.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Paper publication: Copy, Edition, Issue, Print
- 🟩 Spool: Coil, Crank, Reel, Wind
- 🟦 Things a defensive football player does: Blitz, Block, Sack, Tackle
- 🟪 Synonyms for butt plus starting letter: Drear, Etail, Grump, Scan
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #936, which had a difficulty rating of 0.5 out of 5.
Etail and Drear caught my eye first on account of them being nonsense words. It took breaking the syllables down to lay their hidden meaning bare, and after a look around, I nabbed Grump and Scan for purple.
I've been getting into sewing lately, so I spotted green pretty quickly with Coil, Crank, Reel, and Wind.
After that came yellow with Copy, Edition, Issue, and Print.
That left blue as today's rote fill with Blitz, Block, Sack, and Tackle.
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.
Got some thoughts about today's puzzle you want to share? Email us at scott.younker@futurenet.com or alyse.stanley@futurenet.com to get in touch.
