Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 18 for puzzle #556 are an iota harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.3 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, #555, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #556. 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: Tackle, Teapot, Hold, Onion, Short, Field, Stout, Hedge, Handle, Sour, Trade, Capitol, Bitter, Chrome, Manage, and Bock
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Deal with
- 🟩 Green: Styles of beer
- 🟦 Blue: Investment verbs
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Dome
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: Grab a brew deal with the stock market and make a trip out to the dome.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #556?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Deal with: Field, handle, manage, tackle
- 🟩 Styles of beer: Bitter, bock, sour, stout
- 🟦 Investment verbs: Hedge, hold, short, trade
- 🟪 ____ Dome: Capitol, Chrome, Onion, Teapot
It's interesting to me that this week has, so far, stayed solidly in the 3 level of difficulty. It's rare that you get a solid week of similarly difficulty puzzles.
For me, I saw bock and knew there was a beer grouping in this puzzle. Stout and Sour are the more obvious ones from there. I do tend to forget about the English-style of Bitter beers since American breweries are obsessed with IPAs which tend to be bitter at every level.
Going with the flow, I saw handle and manage. Field and tackle fits here but it feels like tangential synonyms and not direct ones, but also makes sense as the yellow group compared to other three categories.
From there, I saw hedge and was thinking stocks which led to hold, short and trade.
We wrapped it up with domes including two architectural domes (capitol and onion), a scandal (Teapot) and a nickname or Cold War era operation run by the US Air Force (Chrome dome).
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Intrepidity: Grit, heart, nerve, pluck
- 🟩 Road: Artery, avenue, drag, drive
- 🟦 Kinds of paper: Construction, graph, tissue, wax
- 🟪 Kinds of tennis courts: Carpet, clay, grass, hard
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #555, which had a difficulty rating of 3.2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Today felt tricky to me but we got it.
This Connections grid suggests some inner body parts groupings, so that is one trap. It also hints at modeling with wax and clay and maybe tissue or construction. So, those are some groupings to avoid.
I nabbed purple first having seen clay, hard and grass. I recognized those as tennis courts. The only reason I picked carpet was because nothing else fit, but as some quick research reminded me, carpet is banned as a playing surface in tennis. Purple indeed.
I got stuck on tissue as the organic term before landing on tissue paper (whilst staring at the Christmas presents I need to wrap). This opened up the puzzle for me and I was able to see wax paper, graph paper and construction paper.
What I didn't mention above was the number of strikes I took early on trying to put yellow together because I had grit, heart, nerve and drive. Strike one. For some reason I was literally not seeing the word pluck and swapped out drive for hard (why?). Strike 2. I moved away from this group where I found the tennis court. Here, finally, pluck appeared out of the ether and I salvaged this run.
Which left roads or descriptions of roads; artery, avenue, drag and drive.
