Need a tip for today’s Connections on Thursday, January 9? It’s as sure as the sunrise that a novel day means a novel New York Times Connections puzzle. This time may prove especially arduous, depending on where in the world you live. I hate to say it, but quite specific knowledge is required here.
To assist you extend your winning streak, we’ve created our daily Connections clue guide, featuring not only a mystery clue for each group, but also the option to reveal four groups that combine all 16 words. And if you’re running out of ideas, you can scroll to the bottom of this page to check out today’s Connections answers!
In this guide:
Here are 16 connection words for today:
| Shining | Finances | Table | Sit |
| Stand | Stay | Down | THIS |
| Sea | Stand | Come | WITH |
| Legal | Heel | Shed | Turnover |
How to play Connections
Connections is one of the most popular (and challenging) daily puzzle games published by the New York Times (owner of Wordle). The goal of Connections is to group the 16 words of the day into four groups, with each group of four words having a common theme.
For example, the words “Hook”, “Nana”, “Peter”, and “Wendy” are all Peter Pan characters. Let’s take another example: “Action”, “Ballpark”, “Go” and “Stick” are words that usually appear right before the word “Figure”.
Your task is to guess what themes connect different words – but be careful, because in most cases there are misleading connections that are only intended to confuse you! To win the game you must find all four connections without making 4 mistakes. On the fourth mistake, the game ends and the answer is revealed automatically.
Each of the four groups in the daily Connection puzzle is also assigned a different color to represent how uncomplicated or arduous it is to find the Connection. These colors are: yellow (easiest), green (uncomplicated), blue (medium), and purple (hardest).
Connection tip for Thursday, January 9
Here are today’s Connections tips:
- Yellow: Maybe you can buy something here
- Green: Things you can say to a specific family member
- Blue: Where you can work
- Purple: Lyrics of a notable song
- Bonus tip 1: One of these groups is decidedly American
- Bonus tip 2: Stand and Sit belong to different groups
If you need additional assist, click on the spoiler text below to view one word belonging to each group:
- Yellow: Stand
- Green: Sit
- Blue: Legal
- Purple: Shining
Spoiler alert! Today’s Connections groups are revealed just below!
What are today’s Connections groups like?
If you need even more guidance to solve today’s Connections puzzle, below we’ll reveal the four correct Connection groups – the themes that connect each set of four words in the Connections grid together.
Here are today’s Connections groups:
- Yellow: The seller’s place in the market
- Green: Dog commands
- Blue: Corporate Departments
- Purple: Last words in “America the Beautiful”
Now that you know the reasoning behind the different connections in today’s puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check out the full answer below.
Spoiler alert! The answer to today’s Connections offer is before us!
What’s today’s answer on Connections?
Here is the answer to today’s Connection puzzle, which will take place on Thursday, January 9:
- Yellow: Seller’s place at the market (stand, stall, stand, table)
- Green: Dog commands (come, heel, sit, stay)
- Blue: Corporate Departments (Finance, IT, Legal, Sales)
- Purple: Last words in “America The Beautiful” (from, sea, shining, to)
Jesus, this purple group is not amiable to non-US people at all. I had no idea about this group and only managed to solve the mystery by leaving them until the end.
Another significant point today was that “Sit” and “Stand” seem to go together at first glance, but ultimately fall into different groups. It took me a while to think about it to understand what was happening.
My first successful group was the blue group of department names, although for a moment I stopped wondering if there was any connection between “Finance” and “Booth” or “Table”. Then I realized I was looking at dog commands and stall synonyms, so I managed to avoid the “Sit” https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ “Stand” trap.
And then only the group “America The Beautiful” remained. While this is clearly very specific knowledge (at least to some parts of the world), it’s not as nasty a puzzle as you sometimes expect in Connections, because at least in this group there were no red herrings. I couldn’t find a way to make these four words make sense together, but equally none of them belonged to any other group, so it was quite uncomplicated to sort out everything else and finally reveal the purple group.
Congratulations if you answered today’s Connections correctly, with or without the assist of our helpful tips above! And if you didn’t succeed today, don’t worry – a novel Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!
