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The yellow group leaned on sports knowledge, perfect for Olympic fans.
The blue group leaned on recent horror movies and thus required some pop-cultural memory.
The purple group worked with prefix-based wordplay. This stumped even the experienced solver.
NYT Connections is back! Today’s puzzle mixed cultural knowledge with gymnastics trivia, subtle horror references, and a pinch of quintessential wordplay. There were 16 words laid out in a nice 4x4 grid, with the players needing to find four sets of four words, all of which shared a hidden theme.
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is for the keen minds and pop culture enthusiasts. Testing February 2022 connections from watching Olympian gymnast Simone Biles to idioms involving horses, June 15th’s NYT Connections purported to pit he/she logical thinking vs a movie questionnaire.
Here is a complete breakdown of the hints, groupings, and solutions, whether you sailed through or struggled with purples.
The New York Times releases a new Connections puzzle every midnight. Using context, language clues, and just a little bit of luck, the player(s) must sort sixteen words into four secret categories. Each group is color-coded according to difficulty:
Yellow – Easiest
Green – Medium
Blue – Tricky
Purple – Wordplay & Most Difficult
Brandishing just four mistakes for its use, that means strategy and pattern recognition! Do remember: sometimes a random shuffle might help to see new connections!
PEARL, POWER, BOOT, PLAY, VAULT, BOUNCE, SHOE, BARS, SMILE, BEAM, EJECT, SCREAM, RINGS, FEATHERS, NOPE, REMOVE
Today shows a great variety of verbs, pop culture, actions, and objects. Spotting the theme is a multitasking job involving awareness of culture and linguistic dexterity.
Getting hints before spoilers? Here are the category hints for today:
Yellow – Tools of the trade for Simone Biles
Green – You’re out of here, pal!
Blue – You might’ve watched these horror flicks through your fingers
Purple – Add “horse” in front and see what makes sense
Yellow – RINGS
Green – REMOVE
Blue – SMILE
Purple – POWER
Gymnastics Apparatus – BARS, BEAM, RINGS, VAULT
Force to Leave – BOOT, BOUNCE, EJECT, REMOVE
Horror Movies from 2022 – NOPE, PEARL, SCREAM, SMILE
Horse____ – FEATHERS, PLAY, POWER, SHOE
The yellows were an easy win, with VAULT, BEAM, and RINGS being chosen for anyone even remotely familiar with Olympic gymnastics. Adding BARS into the mix just sealed the deal.
Then the blues were a real treat for the cineastes. The horror titles NOPE, SMILE, SCREAM, and PEARL formed a spooky, quirky group—until maybe the "2022" part put some off. Yet, very satisfying.
The greens fall into place through semantics. BOOT and REMOVE suggest dismissal, and with EJECT and BOUNCE added in, the meaning of "to force to leave" becomes quite clear. Simple, clean, and elegant.
Purple is a trickster mind game. "FEATHERS," "SHOE," "PLAY," and "POWER" appeared random until you said them aloud with "horse"—horsefeathers, horseshoe, horseplay, horsepower. It is subtle, tickled the wordplay side of our brain, and classic NYT Connections misdirection. Very tough!
The NYT Connections Answers for July 15 were downright exquisite combinations of logic, culture, and wordplay. This kind of mindless rambling, coupled with trivia, is what truly captivates players every day. The purple group showcased how one prefix would doom the entire puzzle.
Whether you nailed it in one shot or took a few wrong turns, the NYT Connections Today reaffirms that the magic is in the connections, not only between words but between what we know and how we think.
Keep that streak alive and join us tomorrow for NYT Connections Answers July 16, you never know what's going to come up on the grid!
