Today's NYT Connections hints and answers — Monday, July 22, #407

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on July 22 for puzzle #407 take a big jump in difficulty compared to yesterday's answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.7 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, #406, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #407. 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 : Realm of expertise
• 🟩 Green : Musical instruments
• 🟦 Blue : Used to redirect traffic
• 🟪 Purple : Food ___

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: Think about an area you can own while jamming to your favorite song as cars are directed towards their favorite restaurant, where they'll use cooking tools.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #404?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Realm of expertise: Area, domain, field, sphere
• 🟩 Musical instruments: Fiddle, horn, recorder, triangle
• 🟦 Used to redirect traffic: Barrier, cone, flag, flare
• 🟪 Food ___: Chain, fight, processor, pyramid

The seemingly unconnected words of chain, fight, processor and pyramid made for a fun challenge.

I found green to be incredibly easy today, with the musical instrument theme coming together quickly. From there, I was a little more stumped.

I discovered the connection between area, domain, and field as land ownership, but I missed out on the sphere for longer than I want to admit, giving the ordinarily easy yellow category a little more challenge.

The blue category is fun, with the words perfectly designed to steer you in the wrong direction. I eventually connected the words to traffic, leaving me with five seemingly random words — Chain, fight, processor, pyramid and sphere. I sat on these for a while before guessing that sphere connected to the yellow category, leaving just the four purple words to finish the puzzle.

I've said it before, but having the purple category be fun puts a smile on my face in the morning, and today's was a good one.

Enjoy the new week. Hopefully, today's puzzle will put you in a lovely mood to start the day.

Yesterday's Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #406, which had a difficulty rating of 2.7 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion .

I suppose the trick in today's puzzle is the short math abbreviations also being other words that could fit into different spots. Tan is a color that could fit with a tree theme, along with the words stump and saw.

I actually struggled with yellow today and found green first, with a little luck. I had composition, makeup and structure locked in as connected, but I was stuck on fabric being used to describe a piece of cloth. I threw fabric in as a guess and got it right.

From there, I was able to clean up blue around being tools.

That left me with campaign, canvass, organize, stump, log, max, mod, and tan. I sat on these eight words for a while because I didn't realize stump was a political term, thus wholly missing that connection. Thankfully, I put the four short words together as a guess and was right, though the answer was them being math abbreviations and had nothing to do with them all being short words.

That left me with the final four words, which I later found ways to support a candidate. Today, I learned a new way to use the phrase stump, which is always fun.