NYT Connections hints and answers, Friday Mar 21

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, 21st March? Don’t despair if today’s puzzle is quickly moving into ‘unsolvable’ territory, for nothing is unsolvable when you have a handy guide chock-full of hints and tips at your disposal.

Of course, using our Connections hints doesn’t mean you don’t have to do any thinking, but that’s the point, isn’t it? The puzzle will still be difficult, but in a manageable way. Have fun!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Friday 21st 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 21st March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Think of your surroundings.
• Green: Look for words to describe a star.
• Blue: Before building a house, here's what you need.
• Purple: Find the one word to place before each of the group members.
• Extra hint 1: Three groups contain a word starting with 'C'.
• Extra hint 2: 'Exam' and 'soap' belong to the same group.

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

• Yellow:Sphere
• Green:Great
• Blue:Stencil
• Purple:Exam

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: Milieu
• Green: Luminary
• Blue: Architectural Drawing Tools
• Purple: Bar ___

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, 21st March:

• Yellow: Milieu (Circle, Scene, Sphere, World)
• Green: Luminary (Great, Icon, Legend, Lion)
• Blue: Architectural Drawing Tools (Compass, Ruler, Stencil, T-Square)
• Purple: Bar ___ (Chart, Exam, Mitzvah, Soap)

Despite the obvious link between 'icon' and 'legend', today's green theme wasn't easy for me as I couldn't find its fourth member: lion. In hindsight it's not that strange, as a lion can indeed be used to describe a person of great importance, but it just didn't click for me until I had already found the yellow and purple theme.

The road to yellow started with 'world' and 'sphere', and then I matched 'circle' based on shape - which then made me think of someone's 'inner circle' and 'society', ultimately leading to the addition of 'scene'. Today's purple theme was relatively simple too, but it would've been much harder if it wasn't for the word 'mitzvah', which I only know in combination with 'bar'.

With only green and blue left, it became obvious that lion was the fourth green word, so I didn't need to recall what a t-square means. I had already matched 'ruler' with 'stencil', but as is often the case with the fourth category left, there was no more need to give this theme any more thought.

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!