The answer to today’s Contexto (#1401) for July 20, 2026, is CELERY.
If you want to close the gap on your own before seeing the solution, here are three hints ordered from vague to specific.
Hint 1: Think vegetables-specifically, the kind found in the produce aisle that is eaten raw as much as cooked.
Hint 2: This vegetable is often sold in bunches of long, ribbed stalks. It is crunchy, low in calories, and almost always present in a crudite spread.
Hint 3: It turns up in Bloody Marys, in mirepoix alongside carrots and onions, and in the classic snack known as ants on a log. A famous ancient city also starts with the same five letters.
Contexto #1401 answer:
CELERY
CELERY is a marshland plant of the family Apiaceae, cultivated since ancient times for its edible stalks, leaves, and seeds. Its name comes from the French celeri, which traces back through Italian to the Latin selinum and ultimately to the Greek selinon. The plant was prized in ancient Greece as a symbol of mourning and later adopted by Roman kitchens as a flavouring. Today, it is one of the most widely used vegetables in Western cooking – a base note in soups, stocks, and braises, and a crunch-delivery vehicle for dips and nut butters.
In Contexto’s semantic field, CELERY sits closest to other vegetables, particularly those associated with raw snacking and aromatic cooking. Words like stalk, vegetable, crunch, carrot, and onion tend to cluster near it. If you came in from the soup or salad angle early, your guesses were probably in the right neighbourhood within a few tries.
Today’s puzzle ran slightly easier than average for a single-word vegetable answer – the semantic field is narrow enough that reasonable guesses converge quickly once you have the vegetable category identified. Yesterday’s answer for Contexto #1400 was MESS.
For the rest of today’s NYT word games, the Wordle #1857 answer for July 20 is available, along with today’s NYT Connections #1135 answers.
