Today's Connections Hints & Answers For December 22, 2024 (Puzzle #560)

Today’s Connections puzzle felt a little on the more difficult side to me, although not the hardest puzzle I have faced. One of the last categories had me a little confused, and I was trying to work through it to no avail. There are also the usual shenanigans and even the easy category had a word I don’t think I would normally have thought of, so to help you succeed where I struggled, here are some hints to help you out.

If you are looking for something nostalgic, you might want to try the NYT’s The Strands puzzle. It is a new and modern take on the classic word search, with a slightly higher challenge than those you might have completed as a child. These word searches don’t have a list of the words you are looking for, but you have to find them on your own, and it could be a word or a phrase. However, each word you do find that isn’t part of the puzzle will give you a hint towards victory.

Today's Connections Category Hints

DECEMBER 22 #560

If you need some help searching for the right answers to today’s puzzle, we have you covered with a fair number of hints for you to use. There are some words that belong together in the same category that you have to pay attention to something other than the definition to understand, as well as a couple of words that could belong in another category. However, paying attention to the details there as well may help you avoid the mistakes I made.

• One category is about different words all used to refer to the same body part
• One category is about four words that share a common feature but not a definition
• One category is about four different pieces of media in the same genre
• One category is about four people that are all part of something else

If these hints were not enough for you to solve the puzzle on their own, there are more tips in the form of category names waiting below.

Today's Connections Answers

DECEMBER 22 #560

Yellow Answers: Revealed & Explained

This category does have some challenges, which may not be as hard for you if you use some of these terms more than I do. I don’t use COCONUT as slang for the head very often, if ever, although I do occasionally just use “nut.” DOME and SKULL make the most sense to me, and while I do know of the use of CROWN to mean head, I also thought it might belong with the other TV shows in the puzzle before I narrowed down what genre it was.

Green Answers: Revealed & Explained

This category feels pretty tricky for just being the green category, and hard to spot if you aren’t specifically looking for it. I also forget that palindromes are even a thing sometimes, as it doesn’t feel like that important of an idea to remember until it comes back to bite me in a Connections puzzle. ABBA is probably the easiest for me to see, although it is a name that might get it confused with the last category. STATS is not a word as much as an abbreviation, which is another factor in how tricky this category is.

Blue Answers: Revealed & Explained

This one was hard just because of some of the names in the other one also being part of the same genre, as well as other names and television shows in the puzzle as a whole. I had a good idea that ELEMENTARY and MONK would go together, and after figuring out what KOJAK was I thought it would belong here as well. ABBOT, however, felt like it might go here and so did BONES and figuring out which one was which was a little harder than it should have been, given that ABBOT is not a full title like the others are.

Purple Answers: Revealed & Explained

This one was just a bunch of names, but half of them do not look like names. That is what makes this one harder than it should be given what I know now. This is especially true given that there are at least three other names in the puzzle and that these ones are not as obvious. However, with the mistakes I made you are able to get the puzzle finished without losing your streak, which is all that mattered.

Other Games Like Connections

Finish off this puzzle and start a new one by picking one of those in the box below.