Looking for clues for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on March 31 for puzzle #658 are a little easier than yesterday’s puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3.4 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, #657, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #658. 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: Mean, Eagle, Standard, Spokes, Gentle, Birdie, Yankees, Par, Crafts, Arrows, Bogey, Shield, Dolly, Norm, Olive Branch, Kate
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Average
- 🟩 Green: Pictured on the U.S. great seal
- 🟦 Blue: Proper nouns in Broadway musical titles that are spoken phrases
- 🟪 Purple: ___ man
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: Brush up on your Broadway musicals, conspiracy theories, and math terms.
Today’s Connections answers
So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #658?
Drumroll, please…
- 🟨 Average: Mean, Norm, Par, Standard
- 🟩 Pictured on the U.S. seal: Arrows, Eagle, Olive Branch, Shield
- 🟦 Proper nouns in Broadway musical titles that are spoken phrases: Birdie, Dolly, Kate, Yankees
- 🟪 ___ man: Bogey, Crafts, Gentle, Spokes
The Connections Crew faked me out with the various golf-related clues today. And here I was preening that I remembered all those terms from Mario Golf. I took another stab at a different thread I’d noticed, Mean and Standard, and it wasn’t long before I picked up Norm and released Par fell in line with them neatly.
With the yellow category out of the way, I zeroed in on Dolly, which I had a hunch had to deal with the stageplay Hello, Dolly! Looking around for other Broadway-related clues, I scooped up Birdie, Kate, and Yankees to round out the blue category.
That led me to take another look at Bogey. If it wasn’t the golf score, then the only other use I could think of was Boogeyman, so I set about looking for other words that would fit. Crafts and Gentle came easily enough, but Spokes threw me for a loop at first because all I could think of was spokes on a tire.
That only left Arrows, Eagle, Olive Branch, and Shield for the green category, all of which appear on dollar bills often enough to make it a cinch to figure out what the connection was.
Yesterday’s Connections answers
- 🟨 Materials associated with fancy dining: China, crystal, linen, silver
- 🟩 Kinds of shorts: Bermuda, bike, boxer, cargo
- 🟦 Nouns in a famous palindrome: Canal, man, panama, plan
- 🟪 Movies from 1985: Brazil, Clue, Commando, Witness
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #657, which had a difficulty rating of 3.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Well, I learned something yesterday, so that’s nice.
To kick things off though, I saw Bermuda and Panama and immediately added shorts and hat, respectively. Bike was near Bermuda so I started focusing on shorts. From there you get boxer shorts and cargo shorts.
I saw the yellow clues of china, crystal, linen and silver and wanted to save it but was not seeing the blue or purple groups, so I reluctantly entered the yellow in.
From here I got stuck because I realized that Brazil, Clue and Commando were 80s movies (could not have told you specifically 1985). However, I couldn’t find the fourth movie. Eventually, I took a stab at Witness, a 1985 movie starring Harrison Ford as detective protecting an Amish woman and her son after they witness a murder. One to add to the watch list.
The blue category when I entered canal, man, panama, plan drew a blank stare from me. I had never heard this palindrome before or could not remember it if I did.
It turns out there’s a Nova documentary from 1987 about the Panama canal with the title “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama!”