Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers, Monday Dec 29

Need a hint for today’s Connections on Monday, 29th December? Connections puzzles are notoriously difficult, so if you’ve come looking for answers, you’re quite right to do so. Before looking at the full Connections solution, you might want to take a peek at our list of hints.

Whether you’re going for another guess or not, here’s everything you need to find the Connections answers today.

In this guide:

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

How to play Connections

Connections is one of the most popular (and challenging) daily puzzle games published by the New York Times (owners of Wordle). The aim of Connections is to group the 16 words of the day into four groups, where each group of four words has a common theme.

For instance, the words “Hook”, “Nana”, “Peter”, and “Wendy” are all Peter Pan characters. Or to take another example, “Action”, “Ballpark”, “Go”, and “Stick” are all words which commonly come just before the word “Figure”.

Your job is to figure out what these themes are that connect the various words together – but be wary, because a lot of the time there are deceptive red herring connections placed purely to throw you off! To win the game, you have to find all four Connections without making 4 mistakes. On your fourth mistake, the game is over and the answer is revealed automatically.

Each of the four groups in each day’s Connections puzzle is also assigned a different colour, which represents how easy or difficult the Connection is to find. These colours are: Yellow (Easiest), Green (Easy), Blue (Medium), and Purple (Hardest).

Click here to play today’s Connections puzzle!

Connections hint for Monday 29th December

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Think of a development.
• Green: Biology.
• Blue: Find the sports.
• Purple: Look for hidden cars.
• Extra hint 1: Every theme except purple contains a word starting with “T”.
• Extra hint 2: “Infinity” and “gene” are in different groups.

If you need a bit more help, tap the spoiler text below to reveal one word belonging to each group:

• Yellow: Trend
• Green: Gene
• Blue: Swimming
• Purple: Minnie

Spoiler warning! Today’s Connections groups are revealed just below!

What are today’s Connections groups?

If you need an even bigger clue to figure out today’s Connections puzzle, below we’ll reveal the four correct Connections groups – the themes which link together each set of four words in the Connections grid.

Here are the Connections groups for today:

• Yellow: Tendency
• Green: Biological Structures
• Blue: Summer Olympic Events
• Purple: Car Brand Homophones

Now that you know the themes for the various different Connections in today’s puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check below for the full answer.

Spoiler warning! Today’s Connections answer lies ahead!

What is today’s Connections answer?

Here is the answer to today’s Connections puzzle on Monday, 29th December:

• Yellow: Tendency (Course, Direction, Tide, Trend)
• Green: Biological Structures (Cell, Gene, Protein, Tissue)
• Blue: Summer Olympic Events (Athletics, Equestrian, Swimming, Triathlon)
• Purple: Car Brand Homophones (Infinity, Minnie, Opal, Outie)

Sometimes, homophone themes can be quite simple if only you search for them. Other times, like today, the homophones are just impossible to notice, even if you do check. At least they were for me, but I suspect even a car enthusiast might struggle a bit with this one.

I know next to nothing about biology, but I still found the green theme first. After all, “gene” and “protein” are hardly obscure terms, certainly not with the many protein advertisements companies throw at us these days.

I’m not sure if the blue theme is really this simple or if I missed something, but I just gathered all the “sports” without thinking about the Olympics and completed the theme. No need to make things any more complex.

Congratulations if you got today’s Connections answer right, with or without the help of our handy hints above! And if you didn’t succeed today, don’t worry – a new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!