This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Saturday 6th December!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Saturday, 6th December? Another day, another head-scratcher to solve. We don't mean to scare you, but this Connections puzzle contains an especially difficult purple theme, so brace yourself... And look up some hints.

This arduous Connections challenge is not yet lost; use the hints below, and let them save you from struggle.

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:

Yellow: These words are not exceptional.

Green: Find synonyms for "soothe".

Blue: Is it part of a movie?

Purple: Search for animals.

Extra hint 1: Every theme contains a word starting with "M".

Extra hint 2: "Moderate" and "average" are in different groups.

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

Yellow: Average

Green: Temper

Blue: Incredible

Purple: Newton

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: Norm

Green: Mollify

Blue: Member Of A Titular Group In An Animation Franchise

Purple: Starting With Herpetofauna

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 Saturday, 6th December:

Yellow: Norm (Average, Mean, Par, Standard)

Green: Mollify (Cool, Moderate, Settle, Temper)

Blue: Member Of A Titular Group In An Animation Franchise (Car, Incredible, Minion, Monster)

Purple: Starting With Herpetofauna (Adderall, Monitorship, Newton, Toady)

Animated movies, again? I've got to thank you for handing me the blue theme, NYT, as I couldn't possibly miss The Incredibles, Cars, or Monsters Inc. even if you remove the plural form. Now I can forgive you for including a "herpetofauna" theme.

Speaking of which, this purple theme was definitely on the harder side for me. If it wasn't for "toady", which contained the only obvious animal, I wouldn't have noticed it. And even then, I couldn't find the fourth member as I was convinced that "monitor" isn't an animal. But yes, it is: The monitor lizard.

It's a good thing we don't actually need to know the term "herpetofauna", at least. Just find the hidden animals and you're good. Apart from "moderate" not belonging to the "norm" group, the herpetofauna was the hardest part of this Connections puzzle.

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!