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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteNeed a nudge before the solution? These clues move from broad to specific. This page is for the Saturday, December 7, 2024 puzzle, No. 545—not the December 7, 2023 puzzle, which was No. 179. Stop before the reveal if you want to solve it yourself.
Hints for Connections #545
Try the light clue first. If you are still stuck, move to the category-level hints below; the full answer list follows in a clearly marked reveal.
Light clues
- One group concerns ways of bringing fish within reach.
- One group consists of four teams from a professional women’s basketball league.
- Four words can each follow “long.”
- One group includes words associated with considering things together.
Category-level hints
- Think about fishing bait and lures.
- Look for four WNBA team names.
- Complete the phrase “long ___.”
- The remaining words are related to associating or equating ideas.
Answers for December 7, 2024
Spoilers below: The groups and words listed for puzzle #545 are:
- Ways to attract fish: BAIT, CHUM, FLY, LURE
- WNBA teams: LIBERTY, STORM, SUN, WING
- Long ___: BOW, FELLOW, HORN, LEGS
- Words for thinking of things together: AFFILIATE, ASSOCIATE, EQUATE, RELATE
The answer record’s extracted wording for the last category varies between “THINK OF TOGETHER” and “THINK OF THE OTHER.” The four associated words are consistently listed as AFFILIATE, ASSOCIATE, EQUATE, and RELATE, so those are the dependable details to use. The dated solution list comes from a third-party PDF record, not an official NYT page: puzzle #545 answer record.
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Why the date and puzzle number matter
Search results can surface another December 7 edition. The 2023 puzzle was #179, while this answer set is identified as December 7, 2024, #545. Matching both the year and puzzle number avoids applying the wrong day’s answers.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What a Connections benchmark can—and cannot—tell you
A 2024 paper by Angel Yahir Loredo Lopez, Tyler McDonald, and Ali Emami describes “a collection of 358 simple word classification puzzles derived from the New York Times Connections game.” The paper reports 40.25% accuracy for Claude 3.5 and 60.67% for human participants in its full-hints experiment. Those figures belong to the paper’s benchmark and experimental setup; they do not measure performance on puzzle #545 or establish how Connections players generally perform. Read the paper and its abstract.
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