Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 14 for puzzle #552 are back on the roller coaster compared to yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 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, #551, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #552. 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: Going, Sole, Real, Butter, Fluke, Sold, Diva, Sol, Once, Solo, Tang, Yuan, Pound, Twice, World and Mullet.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Fish
- 🟩 Green: Words in an auction-ending phrase
- 🟦 Blue: Global currencies
- 🟪 Purple: Words before "cup"
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: Check your currencies for some fish before bidding in an auction for cup.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #552?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Fish: Fluke, mullet, sole, tang
- 🟩 Words in an auction-ending phrase: Going, Once, Sold Twice
- 🟦 Global Currencies: Pound, Real, Sol, Yuan
- 🟪 Words before "cup": Butter, Diva, Solo, World
Welcome to Saturday, and we're back in the 3 ratings for puzzles. What a week.
As I was perusing the grid I saw sole, sol and solo and knew they wouldn't connect to each other. For me this trio of words stuck out to me as a fish, a currency and I thought at first something with singing having seen diva.
So, I had fish knocked out immediately with fluke, mullet, sole and tang. Quickly followed by currencies with pound (United Kingdom), real (Brazil), sol (Peru) and yuan (China).
I had an idea of what I thought purple was with Solo and Diva after finding the other two. But as I was looking over the last 8 words the grid had fallen in such a way that it read going, once, twice, sold. I didn't really believe that the auction words were actually a group but did it as a lark.
Lo and behold, the green category was filled.
Which left the Butter (cup), Diva (cup), Solo (cup) and World (cup) to mop up.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Fantasy creatures: Dragon, giant, pixie, troll
- 🟩 Email folders: Drafts, sent, spam, trash
- 🟦 Citrus sodas: Crush, Sprite, Squirt, Starry
- 🟪 Animal homophones: Bore, Links, Phish, Towed
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #551, which had a difficulty rating of 1.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
This week is wild between the first 1 rated puzzle I've ever seen to yesterday's pictorial puzzle and a giant swing back down to the 1s today.
I found today's 1.5 rated puzzle to be surprisingly easier than Wednesday's 1 rating.
Perhaps, I consume too many sodas but seeing Crush and Squirt was an immediate soda connection for me. Sprite could be grouped with Pixie but once you have soda it's an obvious one. Starry is less obvious but used to be called Sierra Mist (Pepsi's version of Sprite).
I saw the green category email folders of Drafts, Sent, Spam and Trash but assumed it was the yellow group so I skipped it to grab the fantasy creatures of Dragon, Giant, Pixie and Troll, which turned out to actually be the yellow group.
Chagrined, I nabbed the green words to wrap that up.
And then we end with animal homophones for bore (boar), links (lynx), phish (fish) and towed (toad). I had skipped some of these earlier looking for bands because of phish before seeing the homophone link.
