NYT Connections hints and answers, Wednesday Apr 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 Wednesday, 16th April? First you connect two words, then you find a third word to join them, and then - hopefully - the fourth and final member of the theme. If those third and fourth words won’t come to mind, however, a Connections puzzle can quickly become unsolvable.

Whenever that happens, this Connections guide will help you out. With a few hints here and there, victory is nigh.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Wednesday 16th April
• 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 16th April

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Find the variety show attire.
• Green: Do this to leave visual impact.
• Blue: They make a similar sound.
• Purple: Search for the hidden dances.
• Extra hint 1: 'Lion' and 'Simba' are in different groups.
• Extra hint 2: To simplify things, try putting all verbs together as well as all clothes.

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

• Yellow:Garter
• Green:Scrape
• Blue:Engine
• Purple:Simba

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: Burlesque Wear
• Green: Mess Up The Surface Of
• Blue: They Roar
• Purple: Latin Dances With A Vowel 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 Wednesday, 16th April:

• Yellow: Burlesque Wear (Boa, Corset, Garter, Stockings)
• Green: Mess Up The Surface Of (Scar, Scrape, Scratch, Score)
• Blue: They Roar (Crowd, Engine, Katy Perry, Lion)
• Purple: Latin Dances With A Vowel Changed (Mamba, Meringue, Simba, Tangy)

'Scrape' and 'scratch' are easy to match, but the fake Lion King group distracted me. Putting lion, Simba, and scar in the same theme is, frankly, just mean. Only when I failed to find a fourth member did I turn back to the scraping and scratching, and I solved the green theme.

From there I started putting garments together: stockings and a corset, eventually followed by garter and a boa. Although I did realise this hardly describes your everyday wear, I didn't think of burlesque per se - just undergarments/show outfits.

Left with blue and purple, I started looking for 'hidden' words and noticed tangy's similarity to tango, which led to the full purple theme after a while. No roaring required for me!

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!