Today's NYT Connections hints and answers, Thursday May 1

Need a hint for today's Connections on Thursday, 1st May? The yellow word group is often doable, the green theme is usually not too hard, but the blue Connections group can be a real brain-racker. Then there’s the purple theme, which may be downright impossible to find if you’re unlucky.

If today’s themes are tough, let us give you some help. Scroll down for a list of hints, tips, and spoilers.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Thursday 1st May
• What are today's Connections groups?
• What are today's Connections answers?

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

How to play Connections

Connections is one of the most popular (and challenging) daily puzzle games published by the New York Times (owners of Wordle). The aim of Connections is to group the 16 words of the day into four groups, where each group of four words has a common theme.

For instance, the words "Hook", "Nana", "Peter", and "Wendy" are all Peter Pan characters. Or to take another example, "Action", "Ballpark", "Go", and "Stick" are all words which commonly come just before the word "Figure".

Your job is to figure out what these themes are that connect the various words together - but be wary, because a lot of the time there are deceptive red herring connections placed purely to throw you off! To win the game, you have to find all four Connections without making 4 mistakes. On your fourth mistake, the game is over and the answer is revealed automatically.

Each of the four groups in each day's Connections puzzle is also assigned a different colour, which represents how easy or difficult the Connection is to find. These colours are: Yellow (Easiest), Green (Easy), Blue (Medium), and Purple (Hardest).

Click here to play today's Connections puzzle!

Connections hint for Thursday 1st May

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: If you win a competition or get lucky in the lottery, you'll receive this.
• Green: You may use these words when you 'change your ways'.
• Blue: Think of camera movements.
• Purple: Add something to make them tiny.
• Extra hint 1: Two of these themes only contain verbs.
• Extra hint 2: The green theme is the only one that doesn't contain a word starting with 'P'.

If you need a bit more help, tap the spoiler text below to reveal one word belonging to each group:

• Yellow:Purse
• Green:Drop
• Blue:Pan
• Purple:Pocket

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections groups are revealed just below!

What are today's Connections groups?

If you need an even bigger clue to figure out today's Connections puzzle, below we'll reveal the four correct Connections groups - the themes which link together each set of four words in the Connections grid.

Here are the Connections groups for today:

• Yellow: Winnings
• Green: Stop, As A Habit
• Blue: Movie Camera Verbs
• Purple: Words That Precede "-Size" To Mean Small

Now that you know the themes for the various different Connections in today's puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check below for the full answer.

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections answer lies ahead!

What is today's Connections answer?

Here is the answer to today's Connections puzzle on Thursday, 1st May:

• Yellow: Winnings (Pot, Prize, Purse, Reward)
• Green: Stop, As A Habit (Break, Drop, Kick, Shake)
• Blue: Movie Camera Verbs (Dolly, Pan, Tilt, Zoom)
• Purple: Words That Precede "-Size" To Mean Small (Bite, Fun, Pocket, Travel)

I don't know what that says about me, but I solved the green theme thinking it was about 'wreaking havoc'. I mistakingly added the word 'bite' for that reason, but replaced it with 'shake' when that didn't work out. Still, that should've been a clue that this group was about habits rather than havoc.

I got stuck with a some semi-finished connections as well as a false connection for quite some time after that. 'Reward' and 'prize' were obvious but I didn't see 'pot' and 'purse' at first. In fact, I initially matched 'purse' with 'pocket' and only realised the mistake after I solved purple.

The last group I found today (as another semi-finished one) was the blue theme. The only missing word was 'dolly' as I didn't know that term. Apparently it's the cart-like device needed to film horizontal movement. A bit fustrating as the other three group members weren't hard to match, but hey, I did learn something new.

Congratulations if you got today's Connections answer right, with or without the help of our handy hints above! And if you didn't succeed today, don't worry - a new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!