Today's Connections Hints & Answers For July 11, 2024 (Puzzle #395)

Today's puzzle is all about using the essentials to think through the categories and definitions in order to make the correct guesses to win the game. There are some red herrings that make things a little tricky, but by remembering the basics you will be able to solve the puzzle and keep your streak alive. You will want to pay close attention to the words and what other words they could be grouped with.

If you are looking for something more challenging, the NYT puzzle is the right one for you. Focusing on the building blocks of the alphabet, you will want to use the letters on each side of the box to make words. However, you have to think ahead as you cannot use more than one letter on each side of the box at a time.

The Spelling Bee puzzles created as a New York Times game build a streak of correct answers to get you more points, but they can be hard to keep.

Keeping it cool, you will have to use the essentials to break up the words into groups of four that the game labels as categories. To solve the puzzle, it will be much easier if you know the categories. That is why we have all four categories listed for you in the box below:

SCHOOL SUPPLIES

FUNDAMENTAL

TRANSFER

LIGHT-UP SIGNS

SCHOOL SUPPLIES

PEN

RULER

SCISSORS

TAPE

Over most of my primary years, I spent the vast majority of time walking dewey-eyed through rows and rows of school supplies, very carefully picking out the ones I wanted most. Perhaps that is why this category was almost instinctive to guess for me. All of these words went very well together, it was mostly a matter of determining if STAPLE fit into this category or another one.

FUNDAMENTAL

ESSENTIAL

KEY

PRINCIPAL

STAPLE

Where STAPLE really belonged, this category is all about the important words, or the words meaning something is important. ESSENTIAL and KEY worked very well together, and STAPLE was likely to belong here once we ruled it out of the first category. PRINCIPAL could have also gone with the school theme or perhaps