Today's puzzle is all about tightening up language like a pro.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for July 16 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,131. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,130, 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
- Needle
- Ink
- Jet
- Dot Matrix
- Toner
- Point Break
- Laser
- Charcoal
- Peel
- Pitch
- Period Piece
- Bullseye
- Spot Remover
- Eye Cream
- Clockwork
- Clay Mask
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Looking good
- 🟩 Green: Super dark
- 🟦 Blue: Deadeye
- 🟪 Purple: Small
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: Skincare Products
- 🟩 Green: Shades of Black
- 🟦 Blue: Associated With Precision
- 🟪 Purple: Starting With Tiny Marks
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 July 16 for puzzle #1,131 are a bit easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 out of 5.
- 🟨 Skincare Products: Clay Mask, Eye Cream, Peel, Toner
- 🟩 Shades of Black: Charcoal, Ink, Jet, Pitch
- 🟦 Associated With Precision: Bullseye, Clockwork, Laser, Needle
- 🟪 Starting With Tiny Marks: Dot Matrix, Period Piece, Point Break, Spot Remover
Today's Connections puzzle is a good one, offering a good balance of challenge and creativity. I definitely struggled a little with it at first, but once I found my rhythm, I was able to solve it fairly quickly.
I went in order, figuring out the skin care products and knocking yellow off the list.
It took me a bit to figure out green, and I made a couple of incorrect guesses before locking in on the correct answers and realizing that everything here was related to darkness (or shades of black, as it turned out).
From there, blue came together pretty quickly on accuracy-related matters. Next, I just had to put the pieces together and use the process of elimination to get purple.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Terms for the legal system: Bar, bench, court, tribunal
- 🟩 Things with laces: Baseball glove, corset, football, shoe
- 🟦 Kinds of sports: Extreme, motor, racket, water
- 🟪 Words before "room" to indicate extra space: Breathing, elbow, head, wiggle
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,130, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
Today's puzzle wasn't the worst I've seen by any stretch. I tapped into my sprawling catalogue of Dick Wolf show knowledge to suss out bar, bench, court, and tribunal for the yellow category.
After a couple of missed guesses, I managed to tighten things up with baseball glove, corset, football, and shoe for green.
The World Cup has soccer on all our brains, which made the connection between extreme, motor, racket, and water pretty clear for blue (though I struggled a bit with the last one).
That left purple as today's rote fill once more.
