Looking for today's Connections answer for puzzle #555 on December 17, which is ion easier than yesterday's puzzle, this puzzle from the Connections Companion has a difficulty rating of 3.2 out of 5.

We update the Connection Companion hints and clues daily. And if the hints are not enough for you, see the four answers below, along with the category name and related words.

In addition, for those of you reading this in another time zone, I have included a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #554.

There are spoilers for connection 555. Only those who want to know the answer to today's connection should read on.

Or see our NYT Connections How to Play Guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

While today's wordle solution guide recommends the best wordle starting words as a strategy, the Connections solution depends on identifying the categories that are connected from the 16 words. The difficulty of each category is represented by a color, with yellow being the easiest grouping and purple the most difficult. Hints are helpful as the answer is displayed after four wrong guesses.

Today's connecting words are: Tissue, Carpet, Wax, Pluck, Drag, Nerve, Clay, Graph, Grass, Artery, Hard, Heart, Drive, Grit, Construction, Avenue.

If you need a hint to help you solve the groupings, here are each of the topics in order of difficulty:

These hints should at least give you an idea of how to find the answer to today's connection. If not, please continue reading for larger hints. Also, if you just want the answer, scroll down further.

There is a bigger clue. Make a passage out of paper.

Now for the answer to today's game #555 Connection.

Drumroll please.

It took some fiddling today, but I got it done.

This grid of connections suggests a grouping of inner body parts. It also hints at modeling with wax and clay, as well as tissues and crafts. Therefore, these are groupings to avoid.

I looked at clay, hard, and grass and chose purple first. I knew these were tennis courts. I chose carpet because nothing else seemed to fit, but a little research revealed that carpet is prohibited as a tennis playing surface. It is truly purple.

I got stuck on tissue as an organic term (staring at the Christmas presents I had to wrap) before I got to tissue paper. This solved the puzzle and allowed me to look at wax paper, grid paper, and drawing paper.

What I didn't mention above is that I had the grit, the heart, the guts, and the drive, which led to a number of strikes in the early days of trying to put the yellow together. Strike 1. somehow I literally couldn't see the word pluck and replaced drive with hard (why?). Strike 2. i left this group and found a tennis court. Here pluck finally emerged from the ether and I salvaged this run.

I left a description of roads and streets, artery, avenue, drag, drive.

Read this at a later time period. According to Connections Companion, the difficulty level was 3.3 out of 5.

Despite being ranked a bit lower than Sunday's puzzle, today's puzzle was a doozy for Alyce. This is because the first thing she saw were all the names of snack foods: deviledogs, ding-dongs, ho ho ho, and yodels. She struck out first, though, trying to include Snowballs (it turns out Hostess snacks don't have a “w” in their name).

Alyce then wandered around a bit trying to find another use for snowballs, but hoods, pillows, and water balloons finally caught her eye as other forms of dwarf-sized war games.

Next came the purple category. I thought “knock-knock” and “chicken” must have something to do with it, but it wasn't until I started thinking about setting up other dad jokes that “bar” and “light bulb” came up.

That left, surprisingly, the easiest categories to memorize today, Am, Ham, Satellite, and Walkie-Talkie.