If you are struggling to clock today’sConnectionspuzzle, you will need to get a few hints and tricks to finish it off.Today felt a little more on the difficult side than the last two days for me personally, although that is most certainly not the universal experience. Every puzzle is likely difficult in different ways for different people, but if you also found this puzzle difficult like I did, you can use these hints I have laid out to get the right answers.
If you are looking for a new puzzle that doesn’t involve any frustrating wordplay, you might want to try theNYTTilespuzzle. It’s a nice change of pace from the other word puzzles,with a light-hearted puzzle to solve and a bunch of different layers to go through. It is primarily a matching game, where you can pair pieces together to create a long streak to get a higher amount of points. And at the end, you get a very nice celebration scene to help them out.

Today’s Connections Category Hints
JANUARY 02 #571
If you need help on today’s puzzle, I wouldn’t blame you as I wished I had a little help as well. There are words in this puzzle that don’t seem to make sense or go together, and other words that seem like they should go together, but they don’t.Several times I thought I had a correct answer and didn’t even get a “one away”when it failed. Because of that, here are several clues to help you out:
10 Best Connections Tips, Tricks, & Strategies
Four categories with four words each sounds simple, but the daily challenge of the Connections game can prove difficult without a few tips to help.
If you want more help on today’s puzzle,you will be looking to find the category names. If you need more help than that, the full spoilers will be further below.

DOG ___
NOTICE
REGISTER
I was close to this category, and I had several guesses that involved two or more of these words. I eventually moved on and never came back to it,but TAG and METER were other words I considered being here. At the time, I was focused on NOTICE and REGISTER and those words by themselves did put me more in the mind of something official as opposed to seeing something. I was close but not close enough on this one, which is true of most of this puzzle.
RHYTHM
TIME
There was a similar story for this category, as I had BEAT and RHYTHM together but figuring out the other two words became harder. TIME was added in,but I used CLOCK as my guess for that one as opposed to METER. With a couple of other unfortunate guesses, I remained close but not close enough. It was a sad day to lose my streak, but hopefully, my mistakes will help you get the right answers. I feel a little silly not putting METER here now, as I do have enough years of music class to know better.
9 Helpful Tips To Beat The Password Game (& 1 Useless One)
The Password Game can be frustrating as it uses complex mechanics that can be difficult to figure out, even with help.
JUROR
MONTH
This one I do not think I would have gotten on my own, but I was again only halfway there. I had MONTH and INCH grouped together with CLOCK and TIME at one point, but obviously, that was not right. I also thought METER might belong here, as these are all measurements. I was wrong about what this category was, and that ended up being a fatal error.DONUT and JUROR did confuse me in this puzzle, as I had no idea why they belonged here.
TAG
TIRED
This last category is hard to put together. TAG was something I had considered elsewhere. PADDLE was also something I originally thought might go with RHYTHM but dismissed it before I wasted that on a guess.I also had DAYS with the other time quantities at one point, so that was another reason this category was so difficult to solve for me. It’s an odd assortment of words, and it would be difficult to put them all together without more context.
Other Games Like Connections
If you want totry a different word-based puzzle, there are plenty more waiting for you in the box below.
Is It Free To Play?
Wordle(NYT)
Solve a random five-letter word by using color clues.EveryWordleanswercan be found in our daily updated list.
Yes
The Password Game
Create a password in this ever-changing, not-so-simple game. You can find somehelpful tips in ourPassword Gameguide.
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Guess two words on side-by-side word boards in six attempts

