Looking for clues for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on February 26 for puzzle #626 take a deep dive in difficulty compared to yesterday’s puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today’s answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren’t enough, you’ll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Plus, we’re including a reflection on yesterday’s puzzle, #625, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #626. Only read on if you want to know today’s Connections answers.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
Today’s Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Unlike our guide to today’s Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category’s difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you’ve made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
Today’s Connections words are: Dash, Past, Late, Comer, Barge, Underscore, Minus, Charge, Rate, Baggie, Cost, Prior, Pisa, Price, Former, and Hyphen.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Expenditure
- 🟩 Green: Onetime
- 🟦 Blue: Made with horizontal lines
- 🟪 Purple: Simpson family members with first letter changed
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today’s Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Here’s a larger hint: Another Simpsons clue with straight lines from the past with a price.
Today’s Connections answers
So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #626?
Drumroll, please…
- 🟨 Expenditure: Charge, cost, price, rate
- 🟩 Onetime: Former, late, past, prior
- 🟦 Made with horizontal lines: Dash, hyphen, minus, underscore
- 🟪 Simpson family members with first letter changed: Baggie, barge, comer, pisa
I try to start at purple on 2-rated puzzles but often overthink what ones they think are harder than the other.
Anyway, I started with past and prior which were for the green group and included former and late.
I noted charge, cost, price and rate as “expenditures” so I held that one thinking it was the yellow group (it was).
Instead, I went with dash, hyphen, minus and underscore as straight line punctuation, which I had thought was too obvious earlier.
This left the purple category with the second Simpsons category in as many weeks. We had Simpson names with one letter changed; Baggie (Maggie), Barge (Marge), Comer (Homer), and Pisa (Lisa).
Yesterday’s Connections answers
- 🟨 Enthusiasm: Gust, passion, relish, zest
- 🟩 “Many” in different languages: Beacoup, molto, mucho, multi
- 🟦 Rectangular prisms: Brick, fish tank, microwave, shoebox
- 🟪 Rhyme with U.S. coins: Jenny, lime, mortar, pickle
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #625, which had a difficulty rating of 4.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I do enjoy when I learn something thanks to a connections puzzle.
Today, I learned a different definition of prism than I was aware of thanks to the blue category. My main reference point is optical prisms involving transparent material cut specifically for analyzing light. However, the geometric version is simply a shape with two opposite and equal parrallel planes. To be honest, I was terrible at geometry in school instead preferring the lingual math of algebra. Anyway, I got brick, fish tank, microwave and shoebox based on a simpler idea of rectangles.
Moving on, we picked up gusto, passion, relish and zest for the yellow enthusiasm.
I had no clues for purple so I put in the green category next with beaucoup, molto, mucho and multi meaning many.
Our purple group today involved U.S. currency rhymes; Jenny (penny), lime (dime), mortar (quarter), and pickle (nickle).
