NYT Connections today hints and answers — Saturday, May 17 (706)

Tom's Guide

16-05-2025

Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on May 17 for puzzle #706 are a tad easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.8 out of 5.
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.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #705, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #706. 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.
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.
Today's Connections words are: Macaroni, Animal, King, Mail, Ruler, Scooter, Plant, Emperor, Beaker, Bacteria, Commerce, Syringe, Fungus, Signature, Chinstrap, and Protractor.
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If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
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: Get in the lab for some biology of electric penguins.
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #706?
Drumroll, please...
I started today's possible seeing beaker and syringe. My thought was that it was a laboratory group which is why I picked protractor and ruler, though graduated instruments works as well.
Next I spotted taxonomies with animal, bacteria, fungus and plant but saved it.
Instead, I remembered that chinstrap is a type of penguin. This got me to emperor, king and macaroni which was the blue group.
Which left e-commerce, e-mail, e-scooter, and e-signature as the purple quartet.
Finally, I put in the yellow set to finish today's puzzle.
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #705, which had a difficulty rating of 4 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I believe you're supposed to get tripped up by Hollywood references in this puzzle, but I spent an inordinate amount of time being upset by neuroplastic and my strong belief that it isn't a word.
I actually paused playing the game to research neuroplasticity (I did a moment to look for words missing their suffixes). I would say on the whole most places say neuroplasticity or neuroplasty in reference to the surgery.
However, to eat my hat, I did find the term neuroplastic pain and some institutes like Johns Hopkins do have neuroplastic teams. I still believe most people would know neuroplasticity over this briefer term
For fun neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to adapt or change throughout your life, in most cases its cited around brain injuries like strokes or head trauma.
That's a long winded way of saying that at some point I asked myself why would they screw up this word, which is when I saw plastic. A glance around the board revealed Kubrick, Hollywood, and hourglass.
Sometimes you get in your own way.
Moving on, I did spot the Hollywood trap here and deduced that the other Los Angeles words would be in their own sets which left me looking for connections to Sunset, then Vine and finally Rodeo.
Sunset to me meant shutting down which led to dissolve, end and scrap.
Vine is a plant obviously, which got me to herb, shrub and tree.
I wasn't making the Bulls connection as I was more focused on seeing the Hollywood separators but the final four were Jordan, taurus, rodeo and wall street.