Looking for today’s Connections answers? The July 17 Connections answers for puzzle #402 are just, literally 0.1 degree, harder than yesterday’s answers, with the Connection companion rate the difficulty of this puzzle 2.7 out of 5.
Every day, we update this post with connection tips and tricks to help you find today’s 4 answers. And if the clues aren’t enough, you’ll find all 4 answers below, along with category titles and corresponding words. Plus, we’re including a reflection on yesterday’s riddle, #400, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers await for Connections #402. Read on only if you want to know the answers to today’s Connections.
You can also check out our guide on how to play NYT Connections for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
Today’s Connections Answer — Hints to Help You Solve It
Unlike our Wordle answer guide today, where we recommend the best Wordle starter words as a strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. The difficulty level of each category is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping and purple is the hardest. Once you make 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so the hints can be helpful.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, here are the themes for each, in order of difficulty:
- 🟨 YELLOW: Buildings around the city
- 🟩 Green: To hinder
- 🟦 Blue: Names of animal groups
- 🟪 Purple: The Beginnings of American Presidents
These clues should help you find at least part of the answers to today’s questions about connections. If not, you can continue reading for more detailed clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, scroll down the page.
Here’s a broader clue: Today’s riddle will remind you that there are errands around town that you probably haven’t run as you struggle to get going, watch out for herds of animals, and become quite irritated with our generational rulers.
Today’s Connections Answers
So what are today’s Connections answers for game #402?
Drum roll please…
- 🟨 Buildings around the city: Bank, laundromat, post office, supermarket
- 🟩 Hinder: Control, slow down, hinder, inhibit
- 🟦 Names of animal groups: Pack, pride, school, swarm
- 🟪 Beginning of American Presidents: Bide, Cart, Nix, Wash
I don’t think I’ve ever been more bored by a rote fill-in than I was by today’s purple category. We’ll get back to that.
I legitimately thought that today’s yellow category was a trap. One of the real traps is the image of the “laundromat” with laundromat, laundry basket, cart and laundry cloth. This obviously doesn’t work. Instead, the laundromat is just a place next to the bank, post office and supermarket. It reminds me that I have several errands to run outside the home.
I was working on the laundry trap, so I moved on to clutter and was already looking to combine it with brake and inhibit. Check was an easy solution from there, although I hesitated to put nix, but that’s not a good synonym.
The blue category is fun with words for groups of animals. Pack, pride, school, and swarm are common words that most people know. One of my favorites 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 is that it is primarily a category of trap words. You might see most of them in various misconnections you might make, with the exception of Bide. When you finally fill in the purple, there is no consistency. It is not a group of presidents that end in “on” or “er”, for example.
It’s a catch-all that contains nothing. The connection is that none of these words work with the other 3 existing categories. It sucks.
Basically, I think a category should be self-contained, even if you use parts of it to trick the player. In this case, I don’t think it’s self-contained, and as mentioned, it has almost no theme. You can still trick people, but make it coherent.
Where do you stop the beginning of a name? Washing could have been Wash. If you needed a word and not Nixo, you could have done Hard for Harding or even John for one of the Johnsons. Cool for Coolidge would have been fun. Look at the four-letter answers in this category that are pretty consistent and still contain trick elements with the other words in the puzzle.
I shouldn’t be this annoyed by a category, but it was terrible.
Answers to yesterday’s connections
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are Connections’ answers for game #401, which had a difficulty rating of 2.6 out of 5, according to the Connection companion.
We had a winning streak in the purple category here first, and that should have continued today.
I actually had Pan, Parker, and Rabbit, and for some reason I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Piper was a Peter. Especially since I’ve spent many a birthday party at San Antonio’s version of Chuck E. Cheese: Peter Piper Pizza. Apparently there are tons of them in Arizona, but my memory of that place is strictly from Texas. I ended up getting Purple last, despite that beginning.
So yellow was actually my first category completed as I saw Short and Surly close together. Testy and Cross were easy finds from there.
The grid fell so that the pilot, the preliminary and the test were close to each other. It was just a matter of looking for the connection with the exploration from there.
To be honest, Broadway musicals aren’t my thing and I’m not sure I would have ever gotten this category if I hadn’t already pretty much locked down the purple category. I mostly picked this one because it didn’t fit in with 3 Peter’s, even though it took a strike to get there.
Not my best day, hope you had a cleaner day than mine!