NYT Connections hint and answers for Wednesday, 8th Jan

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Friday 17th January!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Wednesday, 8th January? Wednesday's child is full of woefully poor literacy skills, as we all know, so it's good idea to get a little bit of help when it comes to today's Connections puzzle. Crafted each day by Wyna Liu, Connections tasks us with finding the hidden connections between the 16 different words in the grid, while avoiding the various traps and red herrings that each new day brings.

If you want a little bit of extra help to keep your Connections win streak going, you've come to the right place. Below we'll give you a handy Connections hint for each of the four groups, along with a couple of extra hints to boot. Further down you can also choose to reveal a word from each group, the groups themselves, and finally the full answer to today's puzzle if you're truly stuck.

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Wednesday 8th 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:

Pick	Memory	Limb	Biscuit
Trunk	Drumstick	Corn	Branch
Ear	Wing	Stained	Bow
Lincoln	Mallet	Tusk	Division

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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 Wednesday 8th January

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Part of a whole
• Green: The musically inclined might use these
• Blue: Think of a particularly large animal
• Purple: These relate to a particular music genre
• Extra hint 1: Limb and Ear belong to different groups
• Extra hint 2: Try deliberately misspelling some of these words...

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

• Yellow: Limb
• Green: Drumstick
• Blue: Trunk
• Purple: Biscuit

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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: Section
• Green: Accessories For Playing An Instrument
• Blue: Distinctive Features Of An Elephant
• Purple: Words Misspelled In Nu Metal Band Names

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 Wednesday, 8th January:

• Yellow: Section (Branch, Division, Limb, Wing)
• Green: Accessories For Playing An Instrument (Bow, Drumstick, Mallet, Pick)
• Blue: Distinctive Features Of An Elephant (Ear, Memory, Trunk, Tusk)
• Purple: Words Misspelled In Nu Metal Band Names (Biscuit, Corn, Lincoln, Stained)

Today's puzzle turned out to be fairly simple for me, but I can definitely see an alternate reality where I would have been completely bemused - particularly by the Nu Metal Band category. As I imagine will be quite common, I got that group last. I can understand the "Biscuit" and "Lincoln" references, but after that my extremely rudimentary knowledge of music fails me.

The other groups are much simpler, thankfully. Trunk and Tusk were enough to get me thinking of elephants, and while it's true that the vast majority of elephants do have at least one limb, I could also see that "Limb" would fit with "Branch", "Division", and "Wing" much more neatly.

With two groups down, I was a bit confused for a while, but finally decided to try the musical accessories link, because that was the only thing that made sense to me. I just had to assume that the other four words grouped together in some way I didn't understand.

If you're as confused as me, I looked it up afterwards:

• Biscuit = Limp Bizkit
• Corn = Korn
• Lincoln = Linkin Park
• Stained = Staind

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!