NYT Connections hint and answers for Tuesday, 7th Jan

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Saturday 18th January!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Tuesday, 7th January? Created every day by Wyna Liu for the New York Times, Connections is one of the most mercurial daily word puzzles going. Sometimes you can breeze through the puzzle with ease, but other times it feels almost impossible to get meaning out of any of the words on the board.

That's where we come in, with our daily guides for every Connections puzzle. Below you'll find a group of handy hints to help you solve today's Connections, and the best part is that you choose how much help you want to receive. We've provided a hint for each group below, along with two extra hints if you're extra stuck. Further below you can reveal one word from each group, then the groups themselves, and finally today's Connections answer if you're truly baffled.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Tuesday 7th January
• What are today's Connections words?
• What are today's Connections groups?
• What are today's Connections answers?

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

A Few	Love	Barbershop	Essays
A Rose	Certain	Enough	A Life
A Deal	Part One	Various	A Cappella
A Novel	Doo-Wop	Some	Madrigal

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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).

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Connections hint for Tuesday 7th January

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: ♪♪♪
• Green: Grouping things together
• Blue: These might appear on a front cover
• Purple: Repetition is involved here...
• Extra hint 1: Not sure what Madrigal means? It's a type of song.
• Extra hint 2: "Enough" could belong to two groups - make sure you get the right one!

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

• Yellow: Madrigal
• Green: A Few
• Blue: Part One
• Purple: Love

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Spoiler warning! Today's Connections groups are revealed just below!

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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: Vocal Music
• Green: A Handful Of
• Blue: Book Subtitles
• Purple: ___ Is ___ (Is ___)

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.

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Spoiler warning! Today's Connections answer lies ahead!

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What is today's Connections answer?

Here is the answer to today's Connections puzzle on Tuesday, 7th January:

• Yellow: Vocal Music (A Cappella, Barbershop, Doo-Wop, Madrigal)
• Green: A Handful Of (A Few, Certain, Some, Various)
• Blue: Book Subtitles (A Life, A Novel, Essays, Part One)
• Purple: ___ Is ___ (Is ___) (A Deal, A Rose, Enough, Love)

Today's Connections has more than a few potential traps and pitfalls, and I'm amazed that I didn't fall into any of them myself. For starters, we have the word "Enough", which has clear ties to the "A Handful Of" category, as well as being repeatable just like "A Deal" and "A Rose". Evil!

Then there's the strong likelihood that some players might not have heard of a "Madrigal" before, or perhaps would be flung by "Barbershop" if they didn't think of that word in a musical context. It's quite specific knowledge you need to put these together, but at least today's puzzle wasn't filled with Americanisms that us Europeans find very hard to follow.

I personally had to take this Connections puzzle quite slowly. I first discovered the "Book Subtitles" connection, but I wasn't sure enough about it because I figured maybe "A life is a life" is a saying. So I left it at first, and took a slight gamble with the "A Handful Of" group. I figured "Enough" has a slightly different meaning from the others.

That done, I put together the "Vocal Music" group fairly quickly (I thankfully remembered what a Madrigal was after a few moments of scratching my head), and then I was left with five possible entries for the "___ Is ___" group. But at that point I could already see the "Book Subtitles" grouping for the remaining three tiles, and managed to figure out the answer from there.

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!