NYT Connections hints and answers, Monday Feb 24

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, 24th February? Nothing worse than getting a great start on your latest Connections puzzle only to be met with a pesky impossible-to-grasp purple category. Well, we won't let those purple words get the better of you!

Here's how to solve today's Connections. Take some hints, use a spoiler, or have a peek at the answers below.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Monday 24th 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 Monday 24th February

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: You might do this when you're very hungry.
• Green: There's a lot of pressure on these words.
• Blue: Think of symbols beloved by seamen.
• Purple: Words inside other words.
• Extra hint 1: Every group except yellow contains a word starting with 'c'.
• Extra hint 2: 'Swallow' and 'gulp' belong to different groups.

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

• Yellow:Gulp
• Green:Cave
• Blue:Mermaid
• Purple:Shine

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: Eat Voraciously
• Green: Bend Under Pressure
• Blue: Classic Nautical Tattoos
• Purple: Body Parts Plus 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 Monday, 24th February:

• Yellow: Eat Voraciously (Gobble, Gulp, Scarf, Wolf)
• Green: Bend Under Pressure (Bow, Buckle, Cave, Give)
• Blue: Classic Nautical Tattoos (Anchor, Compass, Mermaid, Swallow)
• Purple: Body Parts Plus Letter (Butte, China, Hearth, Shine)

The presence of the word 'swallow' along with the words in the yellow group made things difficult today. I thought 'swallow' and 'gulp' were connected at first, but then I started to suspect foul play by the NYT as swallow doesn't have the same degree of gluttony behind it. Unfortunately, I'm not that familiar with the phrase 'to scarf down food', so I wasn't sure about that one. The 'wolf' variant of that phrase seems far more common, and I often use that myself.

So, while in dubio about the scarf, I collected the green words and shifted my attention to what I considered the 'sea' category after. The first three were easy to find, but 'swallow' made things difficult. I suspected that it might be about sailor's tattoos, but I wasn't sure. Took the gamble and won, luckily.

With the swallow out of the way, it was easier to put my money on 'scarf' as the final yellow word, which also turned out to be correct. Now I'll never know if I would've found the hidden body parts in the purple group - today's puzzle simply didn't last long enough for me to try!

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!