It’s August at last, though if we’re being honest it feels like 2025 is moving by a little quickly. We just keep hurtling through time. This decade feels quite a lot faster so far than my 30s were. I barely remember my 20s at this point!
Be sure to check out my streaming guide if you’re looking for some new shows or movies to check out this weekend. There’s a lot of good stuff out at the beginning of the month.
In any case, we have a Connections to solve, so let’s group some words!
New York Times Connections Guide Sunday July 27th
How To Play Connections
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.
The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.
There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.
You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles.
What Are Today’s Connections Hints For Sunday, July 20th?
These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers. First, here are today’s Connections words:
POLO
COPY
GOLF
GORILLA
CRAZE
PARROT
SQUASH
BUG
CRICKET
FAD
FEVER
BIRD
MONKEY
ECHO
BEETLE
MIRROR
Hints for the Connections groups today are:
🟡Yellow group – Make a duplicate.
🔵Blue group – Trends
🟢Green group – Games
🟣Purple group – A singular version of various animal-themed bands.
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
🟡Yellow group – Emulate
🔵Blue group – Mania
🟢Green group – Sports
🟣Purple group – Single animal in a creatively spelled band name
What Are Today’s Connections Answers?
The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:
🟡Yellow group – Copy, Echo, Mirror, Parrot
🔵Blue group – Bug, Craze, Fad, Fever
🟢Green group – Cricket, Golf, Polo, Squash
🟣Purple group – Beetle, Bird, Gorilla, Monkey
Today’s Connections
Screenshot: Erik Kain
They tried to fool us with the animals today. BUG and CRICKET could easily go with BEETLE if there were one more insect in the list. And PARROT goes nicely with BIRD. But CRICKET is a sport, like GOLF and POLO and SQUASH. Had they included more vegetables it would have been trickier. And PARROT is a verb that means COPY or ECHO. Of course, all the animals here are spelled correctly, unlike The Beatles, The Byrds, Gorillaz and Monkees. Still, a pretty easy Connections as far as these go.