NYT “Connections” Hints and Answers for Sunday, July 12th

How to play the links

Connections is the second most popular NYT Games puzzle game besides the main crossword itself, and a super fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it here.

The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be small global puzzles where the words may come before or after the ones you need to figure out. And it gets more complicated from there.

There’s only one set of correct answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries, so you can’t just spam until you find something. There are color-coded difficulty levels, which usually change from yellow, blue/green to purple as the difficulty increases, so know going in and when to start linking them together.

You choose the four words you think are connected and you’ll either get a solution and a light up line showing you how you connected. If you are close, it will tell you that you are one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without fail, either come here or clear your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get a NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles.

NYT Connections Tips and Answers – Sunday July 12th

Below, we’ll look at some additional hints for each Link group – Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple – and then the official clues and answers.

Here are today’s Connections words:

• Here are today’s Connections words:
• spree
• study
• nest
• sleep
• nerd
• crazy
• party
• pit
• pouch
• seed
• dot
• repeat
• pho
• stone
• runt
• pith

Here’s an extra tip for each link group

• 🟡Yellow Team – Inside the peaches, for example.
• 🔵Blue Team – Full for this test.
• 🢢 Green Team – Sugary treat
• 🟣Purple group – Cities

One word for each link group:

• 🟡Yellow Team – stone
• 🔵Blue Team – sleep
• 🢢 Green Team – nerd
• 🟣Purple Team – Crazy

What are today’s connection groups?

• Okay, the full spoilers follow here to see what the teams are today:
• 🟡Yellow team – Fruit reproductive part
• 🔵 Blue team – Slogan verbs in college life
• 🢨Green team – A bit of fruit flavored caramel
• 🟣Purple group – Starting US funds

What are the answers to today’s connections?

• The full answers are below for each group, finally entering the four words in each category. Spoilers follow. Connections’ answers are:
• 🟡Yellow team – pith, pit, seed, stone
• 🔵 Blue team – party, sleep, study, repeat
• 🢨Green team – dot, nerd, runt, spree
• 🟣Purple Team – DENver, MADison, PHOenix, SACremento

Here is the completed grid:

Today’s NYT Connections was a 5/5 on the Connections Bot difficulty scale and it was quite challenging. I managed to get the Blue words, which I think were the most obvious, before the Yellow words. I was very close to the Yellow team, with PIT, SEED and STONE, but I wasn’t sure about the fourth (maybe because I now associate PIP with dice and dominoes).

Once I got to just 8 words, I was pretty upset. Embarrassment. How does delicious Vietnamese PHO relate to NERD candies? Eventually I started finding other candies, ones I’m not as familiar with, and I had DOT, NERD, and RUNT lined up. I took a guess with SPREE and luckily for me, that was the connection. I put in the rest of the words and, of course, once I understood the connection between them it became obvious. So obvious!

How did you do in today’s Connections? Please let me know Twitter, Instagramor Facebook.

Find more Wordle, Pips and Strands guides on my blog, where you can also follow me for TV and film and video game coverage. Let me know if you have any fun puzzle games in your rotation that I should try Twitter, Instagramor Facebook. Have a wonderful Sunday!