NYT Connections hints and answers, Friday May 16 | Rock Paper Shotgun

Need some Connections hints for today? Read our guide for help with Connections #704.

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Thursday 5th June!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Friday, 16th May? If the theme-guessing challenge feels quite hopeless today, our advice is to take your time, use a few hints, and try again. Your 'eureka' moment could be quite close!

Still no luck? We've got a long list of hints below, so be sure to use all of them before you throw in the towel.

In this guide:

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

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).

Click here to play today's Connections puzzle!

Here are your Connections hints for today:

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

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:

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.

Here is the answer to today's Connections puzzle on Friday, 16th May:

I created a 'famous places and famous people' group fairly quickly today, but I was equally quick to realise that the match was way too weak. Funnily enough, 'Michael Jordan and Wall Street' and 'Hollywood and Kubrick' did indeed belong together, just not as a full group. I didn't realise that yet though, so I set it aside.

Starting to explore the shrubbery instead, I completed the yellow theme and moved on to 'finales' next. I've got to admit I needed a minute to add 'sunset' to the green theme - it's not quite as obvious an ending as... well, as the word 'end'.

Although I did notice a 'bull' link between taurus and rodeo, I didn't get any further than that before I spotted the glass, wood, plastic, and brick of the purple theme. The purple theme only needed a sharp eye, whereas the blue theme required knowledge - because of that, I declare the blue theme the hardest one today.

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!