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Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on March 15 for puzzle #1,008 are the same difficulty as 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.
Article continues belowToday'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: Dog, hog, frog, spork, cog, blog, smog, doze, horn, gear, corner, motel, monopolize, pinion, bogart, sprocket
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Greedily control
- 🟩 Green: Toothed wheels
- 🟦 Blue: Portmanteaux
- 🟪 Purple: Bull___
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: Combine the chains of commerce but take no bull.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #1,008?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Greedily control: Bogart, corner, hog, monopolize
- 🟩 Toothed wheels: Cog, gear, pinion, sprocket
- 🟦 Portmanteaux: Blog, motel, smog, spork
- 🟪 Bull___: Dog, doze, frog, horn
I was the kind of nerdy kid who loved reading the dictionary, and once I saw spork I figured there were probably three other portmanteaus to be found. I picked up blog, motel, and smog for blue.
After that I recognized several machinery parts and whatnot for green: cog, gear, pinion, and sprocket.
Hog and monopolize seemed obvious synonyms, but while I spotted corner easily enough, I had to look up what bogart meant.
With yellow out of the way, that left purple as today's rote fill with dog, doze, frog, and horn.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Hypnotic state: Dream, haze, spell, trance
- 🟩 Starting with prefixes meaning "two": Binary, dioxide, duolingo, twilight
- 🟦 Fictional inspectors: Clouseau, gadget, javert, morse
- 🟪 Ending in female animals: Hootenanny, lichen, moscow, nightmare
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1007, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
Clouseau and Javert leapt out to me almost immediately, which put me on the inspector track. It's how I spotted the excellent Inspector Gadget. It took a moment to find Morse, as that's not a series I've read. Honestly, the only reason I picked it is that it was the only other "name" I could see.
Surprisingly, the puzzle lined up with the purple set in a line. So, I quickly nabbed hootenanny, lichen, moscow and nightmare for female farm animals.
I wasn't seeing the duos, but I did see the hypnotic states in dream, haze, spell, and trance.
Which left binary, dioxide, duolingo, and twilight as the final four.
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.
