NYT Connections hints and answers, Friday Mar 7

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 Friday, 7th March? We're not sure why the NYT is making your Connections puzzle so difficult today, but we are sure we can help you out. With a hint, two hints, a few spoilers, or just the full puzzle solution - whatever you desire!

Scroll down to find everything you need. Don't worry, this Connections puzzle will rack your brains no longer.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Friday 7th 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 Friday 7th March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Look for signs, used as proof.
• Green: This group is associated with music.
• Blue: Search for names, but not people.
• Purple: Change only one letter, and you get something else.
• Extra hint 1: Every word longer than five letters belongs to either the green or blue category.
• Extra hint 2: After the change, the purple group is edible.

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

• Yellow:Label
• Green:Dylan
• Blue:Phoenix
• Purple:Dote

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: Emblem
• Green: Subjects Of Acclaimed Musical Biopics
• Blue: U.S. Cities
• Purple: Fruits With Their Second Letters Changed

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 Friday, 7th March:

• Yellow: Emblem (Label, Mark, Seal, Stamp)
• Green: Subjects Of Acclaimed Musical Biopics (Brown, Cash, Dylan, Mercury)
• Blue: U.S. Cities (Buffalo, Helena, Irving, Phoenix)
• Purple: Fruits With Their Second Letters Changed (Ample, Dote, Lumon, Poach)

I don't consider myself a music buff, but I found today's green group almost immediately. I guess people like James Brown or Bob Dylan are just too famous to miss. It's interesting that the official category name includes biopics - I didn't think of biopics at all, I just looked for four last names belonging to famous musicians. That said, it seems that at least one of the other words can be associated with a musician too, so the NYT probably wanted to make a distinction. I'm referring to the word 'seal', which is indeed the name of an artist too.

Speaking of 'seal', this was the category I found next. It got me thinking of a sealed letter, which then helped me make the connection with a stamp, which is similar to a mark, which leads to the letter being labelled. Easy. What was less easy for me, were the hidden fruits. It's one for the 'super obvious in hindsight' category, but I just didn't catch it. Instead, I just decided to group all the remaining names together - I'm not American and I've never heard of a city called Helena, but it seemed like the logical (and as it turns out, correct) thing to do.

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!