Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on May 7 for puzzle #696 are a tad harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.8 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.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #696, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #696. 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: Choral, Cups, Knit, Save, Recover, Purl, But, Quarts, Swords, Besides, Mend, Pentacles, Opel, Heal, Wands, and Except.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Get better, as a broken bone
- 🟩 Green: Not including
- 🟦 Blue: Tarot minor arcana suits
- 🟪 Purple: Homophones of gemstones
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: Get a tarot reading of gemstones while you heal.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #696?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Get better, as a broken bone
- 🟩 Not including: Besides, but, except, save
- 🟦 Tarot minor arcana suits: Cups, pentacles, swords, wands
- 🟪 Homophones of gemstones: Choral, opel, purl, quarts
Despite a dearth of experience with tarot, I kicked things off with the blue category because I saw pentacles and cups first. Swords and wands were next as tarot suits. If I'm honest, I think those are the only suits I know, are Towers one?
In my what do I see next solving, I caught knit and mend which meant healing to me. So, I grabbed heal and then recover for the yellow.
From there I saw the green category but wanted the purple group next so I tapped Choral, opel, purl and quarts which are gemstone homophones (coral, opal, pearl and quartz). I am unfamiliar with coral gemstones which apparently are red or pinkish gemstones made from the red skeletons of coral. New to me and very skeptical of whatever process gets coral skeletons, especially as our oceans continue to lose coral at alarming rates.
Anyway, ended the day with the green group of besides, but, except, and save.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Silence: Calm, hush, peace, still
- 🟩 Tennis competition units: Game, match, set, tournament
- 🟦 Comparatively small: Baby, compact, minute, toy
- 🟪 Starting with synonyms for "tease": Kidney, mockingbird, razzmatazz, ribbon
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #695, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I saw game, set, match to begin with and just had to find the fourth word, which was tournament.
I was stuck on an Operation board game mindset but wasn't quite making it.
So, I knocked out what I thought was yellow with calm, hush, peace and still. Yep. This does knock out the hush little baby mockingbird trap.
My biggest Connections blindspot is seeing any quartet where you need remove chunks of the given words to find the real group. It's never the way I think as I solve these puzzles. I hate them, so I spent a little longer than I wanted trying to figure out where razzmatazz went.
Anyhow, I nabbed baby, compact, minute, and toy as mini things.
And we ended with the tease synonyms hidden in words for purple. Kidney, mockingbird, razzmatazz, and ribbon.
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