NYT Connections hints and answers, Sunday Feb 23

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 Sunday, 23rd February? If today's Connections mystery has you stumped, grab a few hints from this handy guide. Let's keep the victory streak alive!

Connections puzzles are all about finding the common themes within a small sea of words. It may seem rather daunting at first, but once you've got one or two themes out of the way, it'll get easier. Here's how to solve today's puzzle.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Sunday 23rd 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 Sunday 23rd February

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: These words are used when you mash something or try to make something smaller.
• Green: Handy if you'd rather not spoil anything.
• Blue: You may use these in the morning.
• Purple: Which foods are part of a proverb?
• Extra hint 1: When trying to group the 'food' words together, think of their type.
• Extra hint 2: 'Beans', 'hot sauce' and 'pickle' 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:Grate
• Green:Can
• Blue:Butter
• Purple:Tea

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: Rub Together
• Green: Ways To Preserve Food
• Blue: Breakfast Condiments
• Purple: Proverbial Things That Are Spilled

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 Sunday, 23rd February:

• Yellow: Rub Together (Gnash, Grate, Grind, Scrape)
• Green: Ways To Preserve Food (Can, Ferment, Freeze, Pickle)
• Blue: Breakfast Condiments (Butter, Hot Sauce, Jam, Syrup)
• Purple: Proverbial Things That Are Spilled (Beans, Guts, Milk, Tea)

This is one tasty Connections puzzle. As the only non-food category, it was easy to separate the yellow words from the rest today, but the remaining themes took me a while. I was quick to eye 'milk', 'tea', and 'beans' (as coffee beans) as a potential group, but couldn't find a suitable fourth member. I considered 'syrup' for a while, as you can put that in your coffee, but this quartet seemed too loosely connected. Instead, I put 'jam' and 'syrup' as potential connections.

Just one close look at the remaining words and the green group was complete - it was fairly easy, but I overlooked 'can' at first. The green words had a rather clear distinction from the blue and purple ones since they're preservation methods, with 'pickle' being the only word in there that can also count as a food.

What made things difficult for me though, was the presence of 'hot sauce' in the breakfast condiments. This is probably a personal thing, but I would never consider this a 'breakfast-related' item. Do people really use hot sauce in the morning? Well, every day you learn something new with these Connections puzzles! Regardless, I was able to solve the final categories by simply grouping the condiments (without necessarily being related to breakfast) and spotting the proverbs - I suddenly saw the 'spill the beans/tea/guts' when I started to put the final group together.

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!