NYT Connections hints and answers, Friday Apr 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 Friday, 18th April? Nobody knows the meaning of the word despair quite like a Connections player. If you’ve been staring at today’s word soup for far too long, let’s get you some help!

Connections puzzles are great fun until you hit a seemingly impossible hurdle. We’ll help you jump right over and prolong that victory streak.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Friday 18th 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 Friday 18th April

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: These words form a full sentence - a reactive one, specifically.
• Green: This is a scary theme.
• Blue: This theme is about 'picking'.
• Purple: Perhaps there's a letter missing.
• Extra hint 1: Every theme contains one word starting with 'B'.
• Extra hint 2: Today's puzzle contains titles.

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

• Yellow:Goodness
• Green:Shining
• Blue:Banjo
• Purple:Possession

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: Interjections
• Green: Horror Movies, With “The”
• Blue: Things You Can Pick
• Purple: Personal Property Minus “S”

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, 18th April:

• Yellow: Interjections (Boy, Goodness, Man, Wow)
• Green: Horror Movies, With “The” (Birds, Exorcist, Haunting, Shining)
• Blue: Things You Can Pick (Apple, Banjo, Card, Nose)
• Purple: Personal Property Minus “S” (Belonging, Effect, Good, Possession)

One of the first potential Connections I spotted today was 'boy' and 'man', but I'll be honest, I thought it was just there to distract me. The other thing that stood out immediately were the horror terms: haunting, exorcist, and (unconnected, as I found out later) possession. After noticing 'shining' and realising I should be looking for horror movies, it was easy to complete the green theme. The only one I doubted was 'birds' because I haven't seen this film, but I just had this hunch about it. Correct, as it turns out; The Birds is a famous horror flick from the 60s.

Since possession was tossed from the horror theme, I matched it with 'belonging' instead. I got confused about the missing 's' at the end, then realised the same thing happened with 'good', and only then noticed that this was actually the common factor.

I circled back to the boy and man after that, and it was far easier to see the yellow theme now that only eight words remained. Goodness, this was a tough one!

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!