Today's NYT Connections hints and answers — Saturday, July 13, #398

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on July 13 for puzzle #398 dips down from yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.5 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #397, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #398. 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 : Enormous
• 🟩 Green : Embodiment
• 🟦 Blue : Come across as
• 🟪 Purple : Silent "T"

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.

Here's a larger hint: Loo k for words that mean big while considering if the T makes a sound. Following that, words that describe a personification and words that strike you as.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #398?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Enormous: Giant, mammoth, monster, titanic
• 🟩 Embodiment: Avatar, character, figure, persona
• 🟦 Come across as: Appear, look, seem, sound
• 🟪 Silent "T": Castle, hustle, listen, witch

After the last two days of "school" based shenanigans, it was a weekend relief to not see that word anywhere near today's puzzle.

This puzzle was still a disappoint though, mostly because I prefer to find connections between things and not concepts.

I found the green category first with avatar, character and person flying in fast. It took a moment to find figure but that capped the color.

While I was putting green together, I partially saw beginning of the blue with appear and look. It was a matter of finding seem and sound after that.

Part of my personal disappointment with the puzzle was wanting it to be something it wasn't. I got a bit excited when I saw Giant and Monster and wanted the puzzle to have more mythological creature connections.  It was one of those, I didn't want to admit that mammoth and titanic were related.

I never submitted it, but I did have giant, witch, castle and monster as a category. This would have been preferable. Instead, we get silent "T". Ugh.

Enjoy your weekend, summer seems to be flying past so enjoy it while you can or stay cool in the heat as best you can.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #397, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

This is the second day in the row that the Connections grid has featured a yellow category about school. Good sir or madam, it is July, why are we even putting the word school near anything?!

July is about the lazy heat of summer, grilling, days on a beach, turning forty fans on in your bedroom so you can sleep. Not school. I am a minute or two out of school but let's leave school for August and September.

Anyway, I got the yellow category first because I saw Auditorium first and was immediately looking for other rooms; gym, lab, and library.

As soon as I wrapped up yellow, I immediately saw Golden and the first thought in my head was "Goose". Finding grey, mother and silly was a nice little hunt.

Red and black leapt out to me and I had Vegas on the mind before I saw odd and even. It worked. T'would be a nice start to an Alice in Wonderland set as well.

Seeing the title of the blue category, I understood, but was a bit miffed with "pigeon" since doves and pigeons are relatively the same species of bird. Still, it's a cute category and a nice wrap up after all those school shenanigans.

If they managed to squeeze a school category into Saturday's puzzle I will be quite disappointed.