Connections Today #1163 Hints and Answers

NYT Connections today, Monday, August 17, 2026: the answers for puzzle #1163 are video call platforms in Yellow, spreadsheet features in Green, the first names of country music legends in Blue, and words that begin with a hidden pet in Purple.

If you would rather solve it yourself, the Connections hints are below and the full answers follow further down.

NYT Connections Hints Today, August 17, 2026 (Puzzle #1163)

Yellow: four things you would click to join a work call.
Green: four things you would build inside a spreadsheet.
Blue: four people you would know by their first name alone, all from Nashville.
Purple: read only the first few letters of each word, and an animal appears.

What Are Today’s Connections Answers? NYT Connections #1163 for August 17

Yellow, video call platforms: HUDDLE, MEET, TEAMS, ZOOM
Green, spreadsheet features: FORMULA, FUNCTION, MACRO, SCRIPT
Blue, first names of country music legends: DOLLY, JOHNNY, PATSY, WILLIE
Purple, starting with pets: BIRDIE, CATTLE, DOGIE, FISHEYE

Why Connections #1163 Is Harder Than It Looks

This board is built around a category that does not exist. MACRO, ZOOM, FISHEYE and DOLLY are all camera terms. A macro and a fisheye are lenses, a zoom is both a lens and a movement, and a dolly is the wheeled rig a camera sits on. Any solver with a photography background will see those four and lock them immediately.

Every one of them belongs to a different group. MACRO is a spreadsheet feature, ZOOM is a video call platform, FISHEYE hides a fish, and DOLLY is Dolly Parton. The puzzle has planted a complete, plausible, wrong answer using one word from each of its four real categories, which is about as clean a trap as the format allows.

The second decoy is livestock. CATTLE and DOGIE both point at a ranch, and DOGIE in particular is a specific term for a motherless calf, which makes it feel like a deliberate signal rather than a coincidence. It is not. Both sit in Purple, where the mechanic is that each word opens with the name of a pet: BIRDie, CATtle, DOGie and FISHeye.

The cleanest route in is Blue. DOLLY, JOHNNY, PATSY and WILLIE are the only four words on the board that are people, and once they are gone the camera illusion collapses on its own, because DOLLY was holding it together. Yellow separates next, and the MACRO and SCRIPT pairing in Green becomes obvious once ZOOM has left the board.

Yesterday’s Connections Answers

Yesterday’s NYT Connections for August 16, 2026 was #1162, themed around musical performance, participants, family relationship modifiers, and a purple group that translated the scientific names of four human ancestors.