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Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on January 16 for puzzle #950 are essentially the same difficulty as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 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: Panama, Alabama, Bath, Bahama, Santana, Bananarama, Slam, Pajamas, Piano, Porkpie, Brushing, Kansas, Derby, Story, Canyon, and Fedora.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Kinds of hats
- 🟩 Green: Components of a kid's bedtime routine
- 🟦 Blue: Musical acts with "A" as the only vowel
- 🟪 Purple: Grand ____
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: Grand hats perform a bedtime routine
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #950?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Kinds of hats: Derby, fedora, panama, porkpie
- 🟩 Components of a kid's bedtime routine: Bath, brushing, pajamas, story
- 🟦 Musical acts with "A" as the only vowel: Alabama, bananarama, kansas, santana
- 🟪 Grand ____: Bahama, canyon, piano, slam
Another blue start to my day. With Alabama and Kansas, I was immediately looking for bands. Bananarama was a quick find, but it took me a while to settle on Santana because I was looking for bands, not acts.
I next took a strike trying to make hats happen with derby, fedora, porkpie, and bahama, rather than Panama. There are Bahama hats but the one you most know is shorts, so I don't know what I was doing. I quickly swapped in Panama.
I did see Grand Canyon, Grand Piano, and Grand Slam, but wasn't sure what the fourth Grand was, so I was already planning on entering in the next category I could see.
I am in the midst of regular bedtime routines with my little one, so bath, brushing, pajamas, and story were obvious here.
Which left Grand Bahama as the last one. For those, like me, who don't know all their geography, Grand Bahama is the third largest island in the chain of islands considered The Bahamas (Andros is the largest). So there you go.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Gardening tools: Hose, rake, shovel, spade
- 🟩 Unmoving: Frozen, static, stationary, still
- 🟦 Things that come in flakes: Cereal, dandruff, salt, snow
- 🟪 Words formed by two men's names: Jackal, levitate, melted, patron
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #949, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
Dandruff is the word that opened the puzzle for me as I was looking at it and thought, "flakes." This quickly led to cereal, snow and then salt.
Next, I took static, frozen, still, and stationary though initially I was thinking of movies. Worked out.
I took the purple set of two names with jackal, levitate, melted, and patron, which I mostly took because those four words never fit anywhere else.
This left hose, rake, shovel, and spade as the final four of gardening tools.
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.
