Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on August 1st for puzzle #417 are just a bit less difficult yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.1 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, #416, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #417. 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: Promote
- 🟩 Green: Throw
- 🟦 Blue: Bookstore sections
- 🟪 Purple: ____ socks
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: Consider types of foot coverings while browsing in a friendly local literature purveyor, perhaps tossing novels by a recently disgraced novelist who is no longer being hyped up.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #417?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Promote: Hype, market, pitch, sell
- 🟩 Throw: Cast, chuck, fling, hurl
- 🟦 Bookstore sections: Fiction, humor, romance, travel
- 🟪 _____ socks: Ankle, crew, sweat, tube
Whenever I knock yellow out first, I try to solve it straight in order. Didn't happen today, but that's alright.
Everyone and everything is a brand that needs promotion these days so hype, market, pitch and sell came through easily.
I was already looking ahead to cast, chuck, fling and hurl while finishing up yellow, so green quickly fell after that.
I do worry what it says about myself to myself that I saw types of socks before I saw bookstore genres. Still, upon seeing ankle and crew I immediately thought "socks" and found sweat and tube soon after.
Bookstore sections became the nice little capper with fiction, humor, romance and travel.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #416, which had a difficulty rating of 3.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
This game features an obvious trap in dog breeds; husky, bulldog, and pointer. And I spent more time than I care to admit racking my brain to see if there was a breed I couldn't remember.
After that, I had the blue category down pat with amber, porter, sour and stout. I am an ale enthusiast and very amateur brewer, so it was fun knocking this category out.
I knocked out the yellow and green categories almost simultaneously. After finally forgoing my dog category for raspy voices in gruff, hoarse, husky and rough. Fingers seemed to pop up as I was putting in the yellow words so it was quick to hit little, middle, pointer and ring. I was somewhat surprised that it was green and considered harder than the yellow. I wonder if swapping one of those out for index would have made it easier or not.
Purple was a rote fill today but a fun little category. Perhaps if I hadn't spent so much time hitting the fake dog category I would have seen it earlier but it was still pleasant to see it pop up.
That all said, I'm not sure why this one was weighted so much more difficult than yesterday's. Perhaps not knowing beer types would trip you up a bit.
