NYT Connections No. 1,071 Answers for May 17, 2026 — Connections 18 May 2026
connections 18 may 2026 brought the full solution to NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,071 for May 17, 2026, and the grid finished with four themed groups. For readers who wanted the spoiler-free path, the complete answers were already the point of the puzzle; for everyone else, this was a fast way to check a tough board.
Today’s puzzle was pretty tricky, which is part of why the answer set matters for regular players tracking their progress in the Times Games section. The newspaper also has a Connections Bot, a feature familiar to Wordle players, which gives solvers another way to compare results after the daily board closes.
Conduit and swindle
The yellow group hint pointed to something that may convey fluids or other materials, and the answers were duct, line, main and pipe. That set gave the board its most literal category, with each word fitting the same transport idea in a different form.
The green group leaned on a less polite meaning: what a con artist does. Its answers were fleece, hose, squeeze and stiff, a quartet that turns common verbs into a single scam theme. For solvers, that pairing made the puzzle’s wordplay sharper than a simple definitions test.
Tea-making verbs and school modifiers
The tea-making verbs group finished with boil, pour, steep and strain. It was the cleanest kitchen set in the puzzle, and it gave the board a straightforward category once the other themes were solved.
The final group, labeled with “school” modifiers, used grade, grammar, high and primary. That set pushed the puzzle into more abstract territory, since each word sits naturally before “school” in a different context. The mixed difficulty is what made No. 1,071 worth checking all the way through rather than guessing from one obvious cluster.
For players who use the daily hints-and-answers format as a quick check, the practical takeaway is simple: No. 1,071 resolved around conduit, swindle, tea-making verbs and “school” modifiers. If you were one word short on the board, those four themes were the difference between a near miss and a completed grid.
