Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on July 17 for puzzle #402 are barely, literally .1 degrees, harder than yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.7 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #400, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #402. 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.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Buildings around town
- 🟩 Green: Hinder
- 🟦 Blue: Animal group names
- 🟪 Purple: Starts of U.S. Presidents
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: Today's puzzle will remind you that there are errands around town you surely haven't done while you struggle to get going watch out for herds of animals and become quite irritated with our leadership going back generations.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #402?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Buildings around town: Bank, laundromat, post office, supermarket
- 🟩 Hinder: Check, curb, hamper, inhibit
- 🟦 Animal group names: Pack, pride, school, swarm
- 🟪 Starts of U.S. Presidents: Bide, Cart, Nix, Washing
I don't believe I've been more annoyed at a rote fill than I have with today's purple category. We'll come back to this.
I legitimately thought that today's yellow category was a trap. One of the real traps is the tease of 'laundry' with laundromat, hamper, cart and washing. It doesn't work of course. Instead, laundromat is just a place alongside the bank, post office and supermarket. It reminds that I have several out of the house errands to run.
I was working through the laundry trap, so I moved on to hamper and was already looking to combine it with curb and inhibit. Check was an easy find from there, though I debated putting in nix, but that's not a good synonym.
The blue category is fun with words for animals groups. Pack, pride, school and swarm are common ones that most people know. A personal favorite is a parliament of owls. Let me know if you have a favorite name for a group of animals, I love discovering new ones.
My annoyance with the purple category stems from the fact that it is mostly a category of trap words. You could see most of them in different wrong connections that you might make, except for Bide. When you do finally fill in the purple there is no consistency. It's not a group of Presidents who end with "on" or "er", for example.
It's a grab bag of nothing. The connection is that none of these words work with the other 3 existing categories. It sucks.
Fundamentally, I think a category needs to stand alone even if you are using portions of it to trick the puzzler. In this instance, I don't believe it stand alone and as mentioned, barely has a theme. You could still trap people but make it consistent.
Where do you stop the start of a name? Washing could have been Wash. If you need a word and not Nixo, you could have done Hard for Harding or even John for any of the Johnsons. Cool for Coolidge would have been a fun one. Look at that four letter answers to that category that is somewhat consistent and still has some trap elements with the other words in the grid.
I should not be this annoyed at one category but there you are, it was terrible.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #401, which had a difficulty rating of 2.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
We've had a streak of snagging the purple category first here, and it should have continued today.
I actually had Pan, Parker and Rabbit and for some reason it would not click in my mind that Piper is a Peter. Especially since I spent many a birthday party at San Antonio's version of Chuck E. Cheese; Peter Piper Pizza. Apparently, there are a ton in Arizona, but my memory of that place is strictly from Texas. I ended up getting Purple last, despite this start.
So, yellow was actually my first category completed as I saw short and surly near each other. Testy and cross were easy finds from there.
The grid fell such that pilot, preliminary and trial were close to one another. It was simply looking for the connection to exploratory from there.
If I'm being honest, Broadway musicals are not my thing and I'm not sure I would have ever gotten this category if I didn't already have the purple category mostly locked down. I mostly picked this one together because it didn't fit with the 3 Peter's, though it took a strike to get there.
Not my best day, I hope you had a better cleaner one than me!
