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Today's puzzle wants you to play a little music quickly while taking a drink.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for May 17 below.
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
- Steep
- Primary
- Strain
- Stiff
- High
- Main
- Fleece
- Grammar
- Hose
- Pipe
- Squeeze
- Boil
- Line
- Grade
- Pour
- Duct
We have the Connections categories below but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Connections
- 🟩 Green: Thievery
- 🟦 Blue: A cuppa
- 🟪 Purple: Academia
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: Conduit
- 🟩 Green: Swindle
- 🟦 Blue: Tea-making verbs
- 🟪 Purple: "School" modifiers
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 May 17 for puzzle #1,071 are a bit easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.5 out of 5.
- 🟨 Conduit: Duct, line, main, pipe
- 🟩 Swindle: Fleece, hose, squeeze, stiff
- 🟦 Tea-making verbs: Boil, pour, steep, strain
- 🟪 "School" modifiers: Grade, grammar, high, primary
I kicked things off today by solving the hardest category with a bunch of words that come before "school": grade, grammar, high, and primary.
After that I jumped to the other side of the difficulty spectrum with duct, line, main, and pipe to solve yellow.
At first I thought hose might be connected to the other conduit words, but once I realized I still had that clue to go, I realized the Connections crew had another meaning for it in mind. I threw in fleece, squeeze, and stiff along with it to solve green.
That left just enough time for a cuppa with blue: boil, pour, steep, and strain.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Glassware: Coupe, flute, stein, tumbler
- 🟩 Mess around (with): Fiddle, mess, play, tinker
- 🟦 Music performance directions: Allegro, forte, largo, piano
- 🟪 Ending in synonyms for "asap": Bassoon, belfast, nesquick, thermostat
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,070, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
I found myself looking for other things in today's puzzle instead of what was there, except for the blue set. With Pitt, I spent too long looking for shows or universities.
The basketball greats set leapt out to me immediately, though I did take a strike trying to put Wade in before I saw that it was part of another set. So, we had Curry, James, Jordan and Bird.
I stuck with Wade to get to cross, ford and traverse next.
Was and saw clued me to the palindromes, which is why I picked elba and able. I looked up the palindrome sentence allegedly attributed to Napoleon but it did not ring any bells for me.
This left the dogs in ciao (chow chow), palm (pomeranian), peek (pekingese) and pitt (pitbull). This one really felt like it was stretching the way you say these words. Pom and palm really require you to swallow the 'l'. Do people call pekingese dogs, peeks?
