NYT Connections hints and answers, Tuesday Feb 18

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 Tuesday, 18th February? On good days, the Connections themes will just click into place, hardly requiring a second thought. But on other days (perhaps most days), the puzzles are devilishly difficult.

If your head is starting to hurt a bit, let's give you some respite. This Connections guide will give you some pointers to solve today's puzzle.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Tuesday 18th February
• 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 Tuesday 18th February

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: These words are rather deep.
• Green: When a Connections puzzle proves too difficult, our hints are always [...]
• Blue: This group won't leave you hungry.
• Purple: You will only hear them in the UK.
• Extra hint 1: 'Telly' and 'butty' are in the same group.
• Extra hint 2: Each group has at least one word starting with 'h', except purple.

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

• Yellow:Hole
• Green:Ready
• Blue:Hearty
• Purple:Telly

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: Crater
• Green: Accessible
• Blue: Substantial, As A Meal
• Purple: Britishisms

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 Tuesday, 18th February:

• Yellow: Crater (Cavity, Hole, Hollow, Pit)
• Green: Accessible (Available, Handy, Nearby, Ready)
• Blue: Substantial, As A Meal (Filling, Hearty, Solid, Square)
• Purple: Britishisms (Butty, Chippy, Footy, Telly)

Upon seeing today's Connections puzzle, my eyes immediately went to 'hole' and 'hollow' - too similar not to notice, right? 'Available' and 'ready' were another obvious match today, resulting in an easy first half. As is often the case, the blue and purple groups were tougher.

For me, the Britishisms category provided some educational value - not because I didn't know the terms, but because I didn't realise how UK-exclusive they were. When you grow up in a non-English-speaking country, but you've learned the language primarily from British sources, this distinction can be quite difficult to make. I must've used the word 'telly' a thousand times without thinking about it, but now that this Connections puzzle points it out to me, it does sound rather British.

Long story short, I got stuck with five words ending in 'y' (including 'hearty'), and no clue how to separate them. Luckily, I spotted the 'meal' theme, which eventually allowed me to form the blue group. I don't use the term 'square meal' often, whereas 'chippy' is easily associated with food, so this took a bit of thinking to figure out.

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!