Flint And Scrutiny Meaning In NYT Connections For December 9 (#547)

The New York Times develops and launches Connections, including it as a daily word puzzle in its Games collection.

In yesterday’s puzzle, players struggled to group words like Mettle and Indy into categories based on a shared theme.

Even though the difficulty rating of today’s NYT Connections is 2.6/5, few players may struggle with the group of Flint and Scrutiny.

Solutions For Today’s NYT Connection (December 9)

In NYT Connections, there are four categories, each containing four words. The words within each category must have a common theme.

The categories are identified by colors: yellow, green, blue, and purple, which indicate the difficulty level of each group.

Today’s Connections may not challenge most players because of the word selection, unlike other days, but it can still get tricky due to the multiple meanings of a few words.

Meaning Of “Scrutiny” In NYT Connections

Scrutiny means critical observation or examination, so we use this as a basis to search for synonyms.

Not long after, we find words like Consideration, Reflection, and Thought, which have the same meaning.

This set of words forms the first group, the yellow group named “Deliberation,” which contains words with the same meaning.

Meaning Of “Flint” In NYT Connections

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the meaning of Flint is a piece of stone or metal used to produce a flame.

This forms the next group, titled “Used in Starting a Fire,” which contains words like Flint, Lighter, Magnifying Glass, and Matches.

This completes the first half of our puzzle, with only 8 words remaining and two groups left to form.

After some trial and error, I finally cracked the third group in today’s NYT Connections.

Placing Microscope, Slide, Specimen, and Stain in the same category forms a group known as “Used to View a Biological Sample.“

The last group is easy to form, as only 4 words remain. We group them together to complete today’s NYT Connections.

The purple group is revealed as “Words After ‘X‘” and consists of words like Factor, Files, Games, and Ray.

Finally, after identifying the purple group answers, we complete today’s Connections game with the following answers:

• Deliberation (Yellow): Consideration, Reflection, Scrutiny, Thought
• Used In Starting A Fire (Green): Flint, Lighter, Magnifying Glass, Matches
• Used To View A Biological Sample (Blue): Microscope, Slide, Specimen, Stain
• Words After “X” (Purple): Factor, Files, Games, Ray