Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on July 21 for puzzle #406 take a slight increase in difficulty compared to 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 four of today's answers. And if the hints 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, #405, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #406. 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: Ways to support a candidate
- 🟩 Green: Constitution
- 🟦 Blue: Carpentry tools
- 🟪 Purple: Math abbreviations
These hints should get you at least some way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for more significant clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Here's a larger hint: Do four of the words seem completely random from this week's puzzle? Maybe they fall into purple's theme. Also, stump has nothing to do with trees.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #406?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Ways to support a candidate: campaign, canvass, organize, stump
- 🟩 Constitution: composition, fabric, makeup, structure
- 🟦 Carpentry tools: clamp, file, level, saw
- 🟪 Math abbreviations: log, max, mod, tan
I suppose the trick in today's puzzle is the short math abbreviations also being other words that could fit into different spots. Tan is a color that could fit with a tree theme, along with the words stump and saw.
I actually struggled with yellow today and found green first, with a little luck. I had composition, makeup and structure locked in as connected, but I was stuck on fabric being used to describe a piece of cloth. I threw fabric in as a guess and got it right.
From there, I was able to clean up blue around being tools.
That left me with campaign, canvass, organize, stump, log, max, mod, and tan. I sat on these eight words for a while because I didn't realize stump was a political term, thus wholly missing that connection. Thankfully, I put the four short words together as a guess and was right, though the answer was them being math abbreviations and had nothing to do with them all being short words.
That left me with the final four words, which I later found ways to support a candidate. Today, I learned a new way to use the phrase stump, which is always fun.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend, hopefully, today's puzzle put you in a pleasant mood to start the day.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #405, which had a difficulty rating of 2.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I suppose the trap in today's puzzle is juice, soda, sweat and fluid or maybe that's just me.
This did lead me to finding the blue category with battery, charge, juice and power when I came to my senses and did not actually enter that previous miscategorization.
I stuck with sweat from there. My grid shifted such that labor and sweat were neighbors. The connection stood out and it was short work finding effort and work.
Again the way the grid shift, I could have flipped a coin as to which category I finished first. Fluid, graceful, natural and smooth formed a nice little square on the left side of the grid, so working left to right I knocked out the yellow category pretty effortlessly.
I've said it before but having the purple category be fun, puts a smile on my face in the morning. This was one was cut with burst, dad, maintstream and soda. I don't know that I agree that pop means mainstream but I understand what they were going for.
