NYT Connections hint and answers for Friday, 10th Jan

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Tuesday 14th January!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Friday, 10th January? It's nearly the weekend, everyone - congrats on making it through the week! Let's all celebrate as we usually do, by battling against the witty and deceitful daily Connections puzzle from the New York Times. If you're a bit flummoxed by today's Connections, not to worry - we're here to help with our array of handy Connections hints.

Read on to gain a hint for each Connections group today, plus a couple of bonus hints if you're really stuck. Further below you can choose to reveal extra information, such as a word from each group; the connections of the groups themselves; and finally today's Connections answer at the bottom of this page. So let's begin!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Friday 10th 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:

Sugar	Goat	Relax	Orange
Host	Rest	Door	Hinge
Easy	Rye	Depend	Car
Rely	Chill	Enough	Bitters

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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 Friday 10th January

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: Required for something to happen
• Green: Tools for defusing a situation
• Blue: Mixologists will know this one straight away
• Purple: Features of a specific famous problem
• Extra hint 1: Hinge and Door belong to two different groups
• Extra hint 2: Goat and Car both belong to the same group

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

• Yellow: Hinge
• Green: Relax
• Blue: Orange
• Purple: Car

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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: Be Contingent (On)
• Green: "Calm Down"
• Blue: Ingredients In An Old Fashioned
• Purple: Featured In The Monty Hall Problem

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 Friday, 10th January:

• Yellow: Be Contingent (On) (Depend, Hinge, Rely, Rest)
• Green: "Calm Down" (Chill, Easy, Enough, Relax)
• Blue: Ingredients In An Old Fashioned (Bitters, Orange, Rye, Sugar)
• Purple: Featured In The Monty Hall Problem (Car, Door, Goat, Host)

I'd class today's Connections as just slightly above average in difficulty, thanks to the specificity of knowledge required for the Monty Hall Problem group and the Old Fashioned ingredients. Though having said that, I actually got the Old Fashioned group first. I like to look first at words that couldn't possibly have any other meaning, which brought me to "Bitters". After that it was fairly clear that I should just group together the edibles, and together I realised what they made.

I spent a moment trying to fit together "Hinge" with "Car" and "Door" but wasn't getting anywhere, so I expanded my search and immediately felt like a fool for not instantly seeing the "Be Contingent (On)" group.

After that, the "Calm Down" group was pretty clear, but I still hesitated because I couldn't put together the pieces of the remaining four words. I do know the Monty Hall Problem, but very vaguely, and wouldn't have been able to string together "Goat and "Car" with that context. Still, often the best method is to assume you're missing some key information that ties together the words you've no clue about, and just go about solving the rest. Which, in this case, worked out quite well for me as I got a clean sweep with no wrong answers.

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!