NYT Connections hints and answers, Sunday Mar 16

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 Sunday, 16th March? From time to time, every Connections player finds an extra-complicated puzzle on their path. Let us free you from today's conundrum with the help of this guide.

Connections riddles aren't meant to be easy, so it makes perfect sense to need a hint or two. Find some hints and small spoilers below, and let's tackle this puzzle.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Sunday 16th 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 Sunday 16th March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: These words are more than one.
• Green: You might as well delete a letter here.
• Blue: As seen on the big screen.
• Purple: Do you see a constellation?
• Extra hint 1: 'Collection' and 'library' are in different groups.
• Extra hint 2: Think about the pronunciation of the word 'ballet'.

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

• Yellow:Collection
• Green:Debut
• Blue:Seven
• Purple:Hydrant

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: Bunch
• Green: Ending With Silent “T”
• Blue: Serial Killer Movies
• Purple: Starting With Constellations

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 Sunday, 16th March:

• Yellow: Bunch (Cluster, Collection, Constellation, Group)
• Green: Ending With Silent “T” (Ballet, Debut, Rapport, Tarot)
• Blue: Serial Killer Movies (Monster, Psycho, Seven, Zodiac)
• Purple: Starting With Constellations (Draconian, Hydrant, Leonardo, Library)

Although I initially spotted a potential connection between 'library' and 'collection', I was quick to swap the former for 'cluster' today. It was fairly easy to throw 'easy' into that mix, but I needed a minute to spot 'constellation'.

Next, my eyes were drawn to 'monster' and 'psycho', which clearly formed an 'evil' connection. I spotted the 'draco' in draconian from there, and then noticed the 'hydra' in hydrant. That got me confused for a moment, as the 'hidden monsters' didn't seem to fit the word 'monster' itself, but it did make me realise that I needed to find more hidden words, and so I found 'leo' and 'libra' too. After putting the hidden words together, I caught on to the 'serial killer movies' category (good thing the movie 'Seven' made quite an impression on me) and completed today's puzzle.

Hats off to this Connections edition for adding the words 'monster', 'zodiac', and 'constellation' together with the hidden constellations. It made for a very confusing but fun riddle - obviously the hidden ones belonged together in the end, but I was definitely puzzled for a while.

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!