NYT Connections hints and answers, Friday Mar 14

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, 14th March? Whether they're based on synonyms, suffixes, homophones, similar source materials, or the same colour, Connections themes can be hard to find. Sometimes, the similarity between the words is the very last thing you would think of.

But you need not despair! With this Connections guide, victory is close at hand. Let's help you find today's puzzle answers.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Friday 14th 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 14th March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: If you did something wrong, you may be confronted with these words.
• Green: When you're ready to pay and leave a shop, you often see these.
• Blue: Think of movies.
• Purple: Find a word to put behind each of these four group members.
• Extra hint 1: One group is connected to a kind of path.
• Extra hint 2: 'Magazine' and 'film series' 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:Levy
• Green:Candy
• Blue:Short
• Purple:Dirt

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: Impose, As A Penalty
• Green: Checkout Line Impulse Buys
• Blue: Movies Of Various Lengths
• Purple: ___ Road

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, 14th March:

• Yellow: Impose, As A Penalty (Assess, Charge, Fine, Levy)
• Green: Checkout Line Impulse Buys (Candy, Chapstick, Charging Cable, Magazine)
• Blue: Movies Of Various Lengths (Epic, Feature, Film Series, Short)
• Purple: ___ Road (Dirt, High, Rocky, Silk)

Today's Connections puzzle is one of the most troublesome riddles I've seen in a while. The blue group wasn't that tough as I quickly suspected an 'entertainment' theme, but I did need to get rid of a false group member before I finalised it - I started with a potential match between film series, feature, short, and magazine before I swapped the latter with 'epic'.

Surprisingly enough, the next group I got was purple. I needed a few minutes, but then I noticed a similarity between 'dirt road' and 'highway', which led me to think of an even closer connection if I swapped highway for 'high road', which then allowed me to see 'silk road'. Searching for another 'road' match, I found the fourth member and completed the group.

After 'fine' and 'charge' helped me discover yellow, I was very curious about the remaining words' common theme. But honestly though, what is that 'checkout line impulse buys' connection? Usually I get an 'ooh that makes sense' feeling upon the final theme's revelation, but this time I just find it terribly vague and far-fetched. Maybe it's just me, but random and otherwise completely unrelated items that happen to be sold at checkout counters sometimes (definitely not always) feels like hardly a connection at all. Oh well, better luck next time!

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!