You have a trail of words. The first one and the last one are given to you. Now you have to find the other words and so complete the trail. Each word is connected to the word before it. So to work out an answer, you have to look at the written clue but you also have to look back to the previous answer.
These are the rules of connection.There are five possible ways that words can be connected to each other: sound, letters, meaning, grammar or context.
They work like this:
1. Connection by SOUND: this means there is connection by rhyme (eg cool and rule) or even perhaps by homophone (the two words sound the same but have a different meaning and are spelt differently, like great and grate).
2. Connection by LETTERS: this could mean there is an anagram (eg throw and worth); or that you must add one letter (eg hat and heat); or that you must lose one letter (eg plane and plan); or that you must change one letter (eg park and pack).
3. Connection by MEANING: the two words may be synonyms (eg shut and close); or they may be opposites (eg smooth and rough). Or else the two words are in the same word-field: this covers words whose meanings are in the same category (eg violin and trumpet) as well as the category that they are in (ie instrument). (Universals such as thing and word cannot be considered as categories: they are just too broad.) There is also a connection between two words that are inextricably linked (eg brush and bristle or cook and food).
4. Connection by GRAMMAR: the two words belong to the same family, they have the same root, but they are differentiated by their grammatical form (eg swimming and swam; possible and possibility; hot and hottest). Or it may be a matter of changing, adding or taking away an affix (that is, a prefix or a suffix): for example, form, inform, conform, information are all connections.
5. Connection by CONTEXT: the two words are connected by the fact that they are frequently used together in everyday speech and writing (eg remote and control; Sherlock and Holmes). It may even be that they are often joined together by a little word such as and or of (eg fish and chips; matter and fact).