NYT Connections hints and answers, Wednesday Mar 5

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Sunday 27th April!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Wednesday, 5th March? Perhaps a single hint is enough to make the Connections puzzle 'click' for you today, or perhaps you need some minor spoilers. Whichever the case, this guide will provide you with all that and more.

Just scroll down to see today's list of hints, tips, and revelations. Go even further down, and you'll find the full answers too. Best of luck!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Wednesday 5th March
• 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 Wednesday 5th March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Think of a location, not in the center, but on the side.
• Green: Is this a manicure group?
• Blue: Find every word that makes you tear up.
• Purple: This category is about sports.
• Extra hint 1: Each of today's groups contains exactly two times the letter 'i', except green.
• Extra hint 2: One of today's groups involves balls.

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

• Yellow:Edge
• Green:File
• Blue:Allergy
• Purple:Pickle

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: Periphery
• Green: Things People Do To Fingernails
• Blue: What Might Bring Tears To Your Eyes
• Purple: ___Ball Recreational Sports

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 Wednesday, 5th March:

• Yellow: Periphery (Border, Edge, Fringe, Skirt)
• Green: Things People Do To Fingernails (Bite, Clip, File, Paint)
• Blue: What Might Bring Tears To Your Eyes (Allergy, Melodrama, Onion, Relief)
• Purple: ___Ball Recreational Sports (Dodge, Kick, Pickle, Soft)

Today's green category seems obvious in hindsight, but I didn't connect any of those four words initially - I'm not an expert on manicures to begin with and it was all too easy to make the wrong association for each and every one of them. I was thinking of 'file' as in 'document', 'clip' as in 'video', and biting and painting objects like food and paintings respectively. It's not surprising, then, that I found two other groups first, starting with yellow. The words 'border' and 'edge' put me on the right track, and it was easy to spot 'skirt' and 'fringe' from there.

Next up was - surprise - purple. I spotted 'dodgeball' and 'softball' first, which seemed too much of a coincidence not to warrant a search for more hidden ball games. I had this vague memory of the words 'kickball' and 'pickleball' in mind, and although I didn't really know what either of them means, decided to give it a try. A quick Google search has since informed me that kickball is similar to baseball, although it looks like football, and pickleball is like tennis, but with table tennis bats. Again, Connections is teaching me stuff.

Then, finally, I got the green 'nails' group, thanks to the words 'clip' and 'paint'. It was a big help for me to start thinking of verbs instead of items at this point. The 'tears' group was left - I suppose 'onion' would've been the biggest clue for that one, had I not found the green category before.

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!