Start with the spoiler-free hints. Go deeper only when you need to. Reveal answers on your own terms.
A direction for each group — no names given.
What kind of thinking each group asks for.
Pointed nudges on the words built to fool you.
Every Connections board plants a few decoys. Here are today’s, and why they pull you the wrong way.
Reads instantly as a barber's basic service, and would sit comfortably in the salon set. Only the other three gym words push it toward the body.
Sounds like fitness praise for a lean figure, so it looks like it belongs with the physique words rather than the appointment book.
Plays as a plain cooking adjective — grilled, blackened, scorched. Nothing about the spelling suggests anything edible is hiding in the sound.
The odd spelling looks like a band name or a typo, which distracts from the fact that it is simply a vegetable said out loud.
Four casual adjectives for a powerful, well-defined physique. The trap is that CUT and TRIM also sound like grooming terms, so the group looks like it might overlap with the salon set.
Everything on a salon menu beyond a simple shampoo — volume, tint, length, and upkeep. TRIM is the sneaky one, since it doubles as a word for a lean physique.
Four abstract nouns about comprehension. Straight synonyms with almost no wordplay, which makes this the most straightforward group once you stop hunting for tricks.
Each word, spoken aloud, is a vegetable: a gem weight, a grill adjective, a stylized band spelling, and a plumbing verb. The disguises are wildly different, which is what hides the shared sound.
The editor's main weapon is CUT and TRIM, two words that fit both the body and the salon, forcing a coin-flip over which belongs where. Blue is pure synonym soup — four near-neighbors that feel interchangeable. The purple set dresses each vegetable in a different costume: a gem weight, a grill adjective, a band's stylized spelling, a plumbing verb.
a textbook decoy
requires lateral thinking
Solving the easiest group first reshapes how you read the entire board.
The editors reuse certain misdirection patterns. Learning to spot them saves guesses.
Purple is never what it first appears to be. Six structural patterns explain most of them.
Film titles, band names, and celebrity surnames hide in plain sight.
