NYT Connections hints and answers, Saturday Mar 22

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 Saturday, 22nd March? If you’re suffering from connectivity troubles today, let us help you tackle them. Sorting out the Connections word soup is not quite as easy as you might’ve thought, but neither is it impossible.

Even with one or two themes spoken for, a Connections puzzle can be extremely difficult to solve, but no matter how many words you’ve got left, this guide will help you sort them out.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Saturday 22nd 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 Saturday 22nd March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: If they can play a song, they belong to this theme.
• Green: Search for unimportant objects.
• Blue: Look for the shared prefix.
• Purple: Which words can be shortened?
• Extra hint 1: Don't focus on the first letter, but mind the first three letters.
• Extra hint 2: In this case, don't interpret 'triangle' as an instrument.

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

• Yellow:Timpani
• Green:Trinket
• Blue:Trillion
• Purple:Television

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: Musical Instruments
• Green: Knickknack
• Blue: Words With The Prefix Meaning “Three”
• Purple: Words Abbreviated With “T” + Letter

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 Saturday, 22nd March:

• Yellow: Musical Instruments (Tambourine, Theremin, Timpani, Trombone)
• Green: Knickknack (Tchotchke, Thingamajig, Trifle, Trinket)
• Blue: Words With The Prefix Meaning “Three” (Triangle, Trident, Trillion, Trilobite)
• Purple: Words Abbreviated With “T” + Letter (Television, Touchdown, Trademark, Tuberculosis)

Today's puzzle was tough. Troublesome. Taxing. Tricky. Tiring. T- all right, you get the idea. I do like a creative Connections challenge and this one certainly stood out, but all those T's felt quite overwhelming at first. I therefore tried to look past the visual similarity and focus on meaning first, which brought 'tambourine' and 'trombone' to my attention. Same thing with 'trinket' and 'trifle'.

Unfortunately, I couldn't finish the musical instruments at this point as I didn't know the other two group members. I erroneously added 'triangle' to the musical instruments theme, but still lacked a fourth candidate. Meanwhile, I found 'thingamajig' as a green group member, but being unfamiliar with 'tchotchke', couldn't finish that one either. To make matters worse, I connected 'TV' and 'TB', but failed to find the other short-form words. Good thing I started to notice the frequent appearance of 'tri' by then!

Exploring the 'tri' prefix more led me to the discovery of a 'three-' theme, and so I found the first of today's categories. I felt quite certain about the short-form theme too, so I figured there must be a shortening for 'touchdown' that I simply don't know about, and 'trademark' felt like a likely fourth member ('tchotchke' just doesn't feel like a word that could possibly come with a short-form, right?). This instinct proved right, so now I was left with two mostly-finished groups. After a failed attempt to submit 'trombone, tambourine, triangle, and timpani', I decided that 'tchotchke' sounded similar enough to 'thingamajig' and tried that one - succes at last!

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!