Abbreviations and other lingo dominate today's Connections puzzle, making it easy to stumble through it without getting a single pairing between any of the words. The theme of today's puzzle is short words, making it harder to pair certain concepts together. I had a hard time figuring out which prefixes and short blurbs related to one another, but some hints made it far easier to find the right answers.

Alongside puzzles for recent Wordle games, Connections has been stepping up its game lately with far trickier word pairings. I've found myself using more and more mistakes daily as the puzzles get harder, but perhaps that is my own pattern recognition being a bit rusty. For any Connections puzzle, you have four chances to fail, giving you at least a few tries to find a solution before answers are given.

Today's Connections Category Hints

April 12 #671

Today's puzzle was a struggle for me, but by avoiding the mistakes I made, you should have far fewer issues. Since the theme of the day is shorter words, you have less context to use when trying to find hints. That being said, there are some clues you can guess based on how each word is pronounced.

To avoid getting tricked, follow these hints to give you a good head start:

• One category is about things that are related to amounts of time.
• One category is about things associated with making a mistake.
• One category is about things tied to sports organizations.
• One category is about things where people live in a particular region of the world.

If you want to go all out with some of your clue-searching, you should look at the category names to get some extra help. There are also spoilers for each category if you find yourself needing to solve a single category to finish up.

Today's Connections Answers

April 12 #671

Yellow Answers: Revealed & Explained

I was able to put "Bit" and "Sec" together, as I figured the latter was the abbreviation for "second" I thought it was. This part of the puzzle is actively trying to trick you though, as it wants you to not associate "Flash" with any measure of time. Arguably the easiest one to put in this category is "Jiff" since it only has a meaning related to time, but knowing "Sec" is not an acronym and instead represents a prefix is key to the right pairings.

Green Answers: Revealed & Explained

This was the one part of the puzzle I was easily able to solve, as I believed "Err" could be short for "Error." At the same time, that word also means to make a mistake, putting it in this category either way. The trick here is to refer to "Fall" as the physical action and not the season, which could trip a lot of people up. "Sin" and "Stray" are easier to group in without much reference to "Err" if you understand the context behind each word.

Blue Answers: Revealed & Explained

This category is trying to trick you, as the topic might refer to N.B.A. players, but the words themselves represent teams ​​​​​​instead. I was able to solve this because I ed that the Bucks, Nets, Spurs, and Suns were all teams in the N.B.A., giving these seemingly unrelated words new context. This rare connection was mainly possible due to my own knowledge of sports, but I can see how it would be hard for non-sports fans to see.

Purple Answers: Revealed & Explained

This is undoubtedly the trickiest section of today's puzzle, as it relies completely on prefixes to specific countries in the world. On their own, "Ken" or "Tan" means nothing compared to any other word in the puzzle, so I was stumped. After some thinking though, I realized that "Ken" could be short for "Kenya," a country where one of my friends is from. Using this knowledge, I looked up other countries to figure out what other places each word could relate to.

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