Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 17 for puzzle #555 are an ion easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.2 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #554, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #555. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
Today's Connections words are: Tissue, Carpet, Wax, Pluck, Drag, Nerve, Clay, Graph, Grass, Artery, Hard, Heart, Drive, Grit, Construction, and Avenue.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Intrepidity
- 🟩 Green: Road
- 🟦 Blue: Kinds of paper
- 🟪 Purple: Kinds of tennis courts
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Here's a larger hint: Iga Swiatek has determination. Build a passage out of paper.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #555?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Intrepidity: Grit, heart, nerve, pluck
- 🟩 Road: Artery, avenue, drag, drive
- 🟦 Kinds of paper: Construction, graph, tissue, wax
- 🟪 Kinds of tennis courts: Carpet, clay, grass, hard
Today felt tricky to me but we got it.
This Connections grid suggests some inner body parts groupings, so that is one trap. It also hints at modeling with wax and clay and maybe tissue or construction. So, those are some groupings to avoid.
I nabbed purple first having seen clay, hard and grass. I recognized those as tennis courts. The only reason I picked carpet was because nothing else fit, but as some quick research reminded me, carpet is banned as a playing surface in tennis. Purple indeed.
I got stuck on tissue as the organic term before landing on tissue paper (whilst staring at the Christmas presents I need to wrap). This opened up the puzzle for me and I was able to see wax paper, graph paper and construction paper.
What I didn't mention above was the number of strikes I took early on trying to put yellow together because I had grit, heart, nerve and drive. Strike one. For some reason I was literally not seeing the word pluck and swapped out drive for hard (why?). Strike 2. I moved away from this group where I found the tennis court. Here, finally, pluck appeared out of the ether and I salvaged this run.
Which left roads or descriptions of roads; artery, avenue, drag and drive.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Types of radio: Am, Ham, Satellite, Walkie-talkie
- 🟩 Kinds of play fights: Food, Pillow, Snowball, Water Balloon
- 🟦 Snack cakes: Devil Dog, Ding Dong, Hoho, Yodel
- 🟪 Classic Joke Staples: Bar, Chicken, Knock-Knock, Light Bulb
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #554, which had a difficulty rating of 3.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Despite being ranked a bit lower than Sunday's puzzle, today's puzzle was a doozy for Alyse. She must have been hungry, because what stuck out to me first were all the snack food names: Devil Dog, Ding Dong, Hoho, and Yodel. Though she first struck out by trying to include Snowball (turns out the Hostess snack drops the "w" in the name).
After that Alyse floundered for a bit trying to find another use for Snowball when Food, Pillow, and Water Balloon finally caught her attention as other forms of playing war on a pint-size scale.
Next came the purple category. Something told her Knock-Knock and Chicken had to be related, but it wasn't until she started brainstorming other dad joke set-ups that Bar and Light Bulb popped out.
That left, surprisingly, the easiest category as today's rote fill with Am, Ham, Satellite, and Walkie-Talkie.
