NYT Connections hints and answers, Monday Apr 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 Monday, 21st April? If the coupling of Connections words is proving harder than usual today, don’t give up. A hint or two may be all you need to achieve victory.

Luckily, we’ve got every hint you could ask for; one for each theme (yellow to purple) and two extras. The puzzle solution won’t be far away!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Monday 21st 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 Monday 21st April

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: All of this could be found in your food.
• Green: These words are 'unforeseen'.
• Blue: As seen in Excel.
• Purple: These words have something in common with spiral stairs.
• Extra hint 1: Only the yellow theme doesn't contain a word starting with 'C'.
• Extra hint 2: 'Cell' and 'DNA' are in different groups.

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

• Yellow:Protein
• Green:Curveball
• Blue:Sheet
• Purple:Spring

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: Info On A Nutrition Label
• Green: Metaphor For Something Unexpected
• Blue: Things You Can Insert Into A Spreadsheet
• Purple: Helical Things

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 Monday, 21st April:

• Yellow: Info On A Nutrition Label (Fat, Iron, Protein, Sodium)
• Green: Metaphor For Something Unexpected (Bombshell, Curveball, Twist, Wrench)
• Blue: Things You Can Insert Into A Spreadsheet (Cell, Column, Row, Sheet)
• Purple: Helical Things (Corkscrew, Dna, Fusilli, Spring)

Is it just me or is the spreadsheet theme by far the easiest today? Perhaps I've just been forced to use Excel too often, but when I see words like 'row' and 'column' in close proximity, that's where my mind will take me. Needless to say, the blue theme was the first one I got today.

While the green theme seems so obvious in hindsight, I couldn't match these words at all. The yellow group was fairly easy once I'd found protein and sodium, but 'bombshell' and 'curveball' just didn't click for me - even though I find them quite similar visually. I just got stuck on the 'attractive woman' and 'sports throw' meaning of each word respectively.

Good thing I'm very familiar with pasta types, so when I saw 'fusilli', I immediately guessed it had something to do with the shape. Linking the words 'corkscrew', and 'spring' was obvious after that.

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!