NYT Connections hints and answers, Wednesday Mar 12

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, 12th March? Connecting four words by their common theme sounds easy, but depending on the theme, it can become an arduous challenge. Even if your brains don't shy away from a proper racking, some Connections puzzles are simply too difficult to solve without help.

Luckily, help is exactly what we provide here; this guide will give you all the hints, tips, and spoilers you need.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Wednesday 12th 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 12th March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: It's not a theme, it's a recipe.
• Green: Find words with the same colour.
• Blue: Poets wouldn't like this theme.
• Purple: Think of something sweet, then put it behind these words.
• Extra hint 1: Every theme except blue contains a word starting with 'e'.
• Extra hint 2: Ketchup, orange, and sugar are in different groups.

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

• Yellow:Butter
• Green:Cardinal
• Blue:Orange
• Purple:Eye

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: Ingredients In Classic Pound Cake
• Green: Things That Are Red
• Blue: Words Said To Have No Exact Rhymes
• Purple: ___ Candy

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, 12th March:

• Yellow: Ingredients In Classic Pound Cake (Butter, Eggs, Flour, Sugar)
• Green: Things That Are Red (Cardinal, Elmo, Ketchup, Rose)
• Blue: Words Said To Have No Exact Rhymes (Month, Orange, Purple, Silver)
• Purple: ___ Candy (Cotton, Eye, John, Rock)

Today's yellow category was easy enough, even though I assumed it was simply about 'ingredients needed to bake a cake' rather than pound cake specifically. I guess you could add rose petals and orange to a cake recipe, but since they're definitely no core ingredients, there was little doubt there.

Unlike the yellow words, green and blue gave me far more trouble today. I was trying to find a theme with rose and orange, and then with orange, silver, and purple, but nothing made sense. I actually noticed the purple category first because of cotton candy, followed by eye candy. It doesn't happen that often that the purple one feels easier than green.

Ultimately, I entered 'orange, purple, silver, and rose' and got one failed attempt, then started thinking about the fact that 'orange, silver, and rose' are both colours and objects, and then realized that some of the remaining words have a clear connection to a colour as well - namely red. I paired rose with ketchup, and found the green group. This one was tough!

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!