NYT Connections game #586 was published for Friday, January 17, 2025. If you are still solving, use the progressive hints below; the complete four-group answer key is farther down and clearly marked as a spoiler.
Hints for Connections #586
These short hints are adapted from contemporaneous answer guides; they are not presented as official NYT hints. Read them in order and stop when you have enough to continue.
- Hot dog
- Whack
- View the internet
- Brews at the end
The 16 words on the board
HIT, OPERA, BANGER, ROSEBUD, PEPPERONI, BOP, EDGE, LINK, TAP, CONTRABASS, BRAT, SAFARI, AUTOHARP, CHROME, KNOCK, SAUSAGE.
Spoiler: answers for January 17, 2025
Stop here if you do not want the solutions revealed.
#1 Best Overall
| Color | Category | Words | Connection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yellow | FRANKFURTER | BANGER, BRAT, LINK, SAUSAGE | Terms for types of sausage or frankfurter. |
| Green | STRIKE | BOP, HIT, KNOCK, TAP | Each can describe a blow or an act of striking or making contact. |
| Blue | WEB BROWSERS | CHROME, EDGE, OPERA, SAFARI | Names of web browsers. |
| Purple | ENDING WITH BEER BRANDS | AUTOHARP, CONTRABASS, PEPPERONI, ROSEBUD | The endings contain Harp, Bass, Peroni, and Bud. |
Why the purple group is easy to miss
PEPPERONI looks like it should join the food-related words, but its role here is wordplay: its ending contains Peroni, a beer brand. The other entries work the same way: AUTOHARP ends in Harp, CONTRABASS in Bass, and ROSEBUD in Bud.
A practical solving route is to spot the browser names, then separate the direct meaning groups—frankfurter terms and words meaning strike—from the embedded beer-brand pattern. That is a qualitative way to read the puzzle, not a published difficulty rating.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.About this answer key
TechRadar and Parade both identify this as game #586 for January 17, 2025, and their answer guides report the same four categories and word sets. TechRadar’s author described their personal experience as “Moderate” with one mistake; that is an individual report, not a standardized difficulty measure. The game-specific solutions here are corroborated by those secondary guides rather than an official NYT archive.
TechRadar’s January 17, 2025 Connections guide · Parade’s Connections hints and answers page
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