NYT Connections January 16: Get the Hints and Final Answer

By Hollywood Life | Created at 2025-01-16 10:32:01 | Updated at 2025-01-16 13:18:46 2 hours ago

The New York Times has several addicting yet educational word games to crack! Since “Connections” is one of the publication’s toughest games, the answer for today, January 16, 2025, may have been a difficult one to solve.

Luckily, we’ve got the hints and the final answer to today’s puzzle below.

How to Play ‘Connections’

“Connections” gives players a set of 16 words in a grid, and they have to separate the words into four related groups. The difficulty of each category is divided by the colors yellow, green, blue and purple. Yellow is the easiest one, and purple is considered the most difficult category.

After a player selects each group’s four words, they click “submit,” which should become the category’s color if it’s correct.

‘Connections’ January 16 Hints

The hints for today’s “Connections” game are as follows:

Yellow group: A type of work
Green group: A home essential
Blue group: person working with the Secret Service
Purple group: Not quite a mouse

“Connections” editor Wyna Liu knows all about the frustration that players have when they can’t solve the game. While speaking with Slate in July 2024, Liu described the process behind creating each game.

“The process is I have a notebook where I keep down category ideas. And when I sit down to make boards, I’ll take one of those ideas, I’ll take those words, and then I’ll start spinning off of them,” Liu said at the time. “And then, the boards will be built from that, and sometimes it goes in surprising directions. I feel like that’s sort of one of the most joyful things about making games. I don’t know what the categories are gonna be. I start with like a seed. And then I’m just like, ‘Oh, what does this word do?,’ and then maybe like a dozen categories of possibilities and then you kind of see if any of those words are playing off each other, and the brain builds from that.”