Today's puzzle should be a treat for those who are fans of Broadway, or are looking for something to wear this summer.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for July 21 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,136. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,135, 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
- Music
- Gram
- Driver
- Vision
- Tube
- Crop
- Book
- App
- Orchestration
- Extension
- Tank
- Kinesis
- Prompter
- Halter
- Lyrics
- Plugin
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Tees
- 🟩 Green: Programs
- 🟦 Blue: Theatre
- 🟪 Purple: On the tube
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: Kinds of tops
- 🟩 Green: Software downloads
- 🟦 Blue: Elements of a musical
- 🟪 Purple: Tele____
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 21 for puzzle #1,136 are a much easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Kinds of tops: Crop, halter, tank, tube
- 🟩 Software downloads: App, driver, extension, plugin
- 🟦 Elements of a musical: Book, lyrics, music, orchestration
- 🟪 Tele____: Gram, kinesis, prompter, vision
I ended up going down the line today, somewhat by accident.
I thought I was being vaguely clever when I connected tops with tank, tube, crop, and halter. But alas, it was the yellow.
So, I grabbed the next thing I saw in software with extension, plugin, driver and app. Green down.
Book and lyrics popped to me as musical, which is why I chose music and orchestration for the blue set.
That left telegram, telekinesis, teleprompter, and television as my final four.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Announce: Blare, herald, sound, trumpet
- 🟩 Things to click: Button, icon, link, menu
- 🟦 Associated with pearls: Bubble tea, oysters, swine, wisdom
- 🟪 Starting with alcoholic beverages: Alexa, meadow, portobellos, sakes
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,135, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5.
Today's Connections puzzle was a doozie. I first struck out by trying to connect all the types of mushrooms I saw on the board. Then I tried to take a step back and start simple with some synonyms I spotted that ended up being yellow: blare, herald, sound, and trumpet.
After that, I realized the clues button, icon, link, and menu were a bit more abstract than they seemed for green.
Bubble tea was really throwing me, but once I took another look around the board and saw wisdom, the connection finally clicked. I threw in swine and finally got rid of oyster to solve blue.
That left purple as today's rote fill with alexa, meadow, sakes, and the last remaining mushroom, portobello.
