Today's puzzle is fairly straightforward and made me want to go out for a fancy dinner.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for October 17 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,224. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,223, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
What is Connections
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.
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.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Today's Connection Grid and Words
- Brea
- King
- Snap
- Ping
- Still
- Paz
- Snow
- Shot
- Boheme
- Fiddler
- Alert
- Chime
- Scala
- Hermit
- Ding
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Annoying on your phone
- 🟩 Green: Insta
- 🟦 Blue: Seafood
- 🟪 Purple: No more Dodgers
Today's Connections Group Hints
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Digital notifications
- 🟩 Green: Photo
- 🟦 Blue: Kinds of crabs
- 🟪 Purple: La ____
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.
Today's Connections answers
The Connections answers on October 17 for puzzle #1,224 are significantly easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Digital notifications: Alert, chime, ding, ping
- 🟩 Photo: Print, shot, snap, still
- 🟦 Kinds of crabs: Fiddler, hermit, king, snow
- 🟪 La ____: Boheme, brea, paz, scala
Pulled a reverse rainbow today, which you hope for when the puzzle is rated under two.
Brea immediately had me in the Las, so it was a quick run to La Boheme, La Paz and La Scala, I assume in reference to the upscale Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills.
Crabs was immediate with King and Snow, quickly followed by Fiddler and Hermit.
I wasn't sure which was green or yellow since yellow is usually a verb while greens tend to be nouns, but I considered both of these sets nouns. Though I suppose the yellow set leans more toward verbs in that these are actions happening on your phone.
So, green was print, shot, snap and still. Yellow is alert, chime, ding, and ping.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Surface imperfections: Chip, mark, nick, scratch
- 🟩 Landlocked countries: Chad, hungary, laos, paraguay
- 🟦 European countries minus a letter: Bulgari, cyrus, hungry, span
- 🟪 Starting with words for "stylish": Chicken, coolidge, hippo, smarties
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,223 which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5.
I'm glad that I got the countries out of the way right away in today's puzzle with Chad, Hungary, Laos and Paraguay.
I say that mostly because Hungary and Hungry were so obvious that I wasn't entirely sure if it was what I thought it would be when I spotted Cyrus. I put in the countries just to see, which locked in the blue for me.
So, it's Hungry (Hungary), Cyrus (Cyprus), Bulgari (Bulgaria) and Span (Spain).
I spotted the yellow set so I put in the purple group of chicken, coolidge, hippo, and smarties without really seeing the stylish connection.
And that left chip, mark, nick and scratch.
