Why It Mattered In Today’s Puzzle

One group was simply “shades of black”. The puzzle wanted charcoal, ink, jet, and pitch grouped as color words.

The catch is that every one of these words has a second life. Charcoal is a face mask ingredient. Pitch is a sales talk or a baseball throw. Jet is an airplane. Ink is what a pen holds. That overlap is why the group felt slippery.

Seeing them as colors first, and second meanings second, was the key move.

What Each Word Means As Black

• Charcoal: a deep gray-black, like burnt wood.
• Ink: a rich, glossy black, like fresh pen ink.
• Jet: a pure, intense black, from the gemstone jet.
• Pitch: total darkness, from tar-like pitch, as in “pitch black”.

Examples In Plain English

• “Her hair was jet black in the sun.”
• “The cave was pitch black, so we used our phones.”
• “He painted the fence charcoal, not plain black.”
• “The night sky looked ink black over the ocean.”

Common Mistake

The biggest mistake is chasing the second meanings. Players see “pitch” and think baseball, or see “charcoal” and think skincare mask.

Another slip is arguing that charcoal is really gray. In color talk, charcoal still counts as a shade of black, just a lighter one.

Related Terms

• Ebony: another word for deep black, from the dark wood.
• Onyx: a black stone often used to describe glossy black.
• Coal black: plain, heavy black.
• Raven: black with a slight shine, like a raven’s feathers.

Wrong Guess Note

Many solvers tried to move charcoal into the skincare group and pitch into a sports or business idea. Both belonged with the color words.

The puzzle also hid a wordplay group. If that one got you, see what a period piece means, why point break has two meanings, and what a dot matrix is. Line up tomorrow with the July 17, 2026 Connections guide.

Quick Recap

Charcoal, ink, jet, and pitch are all ways to describe black. In the July 16 puzzle, the trick was ignoring their other meanings and reading them as pure color words.

This page explains the shades of black for readers who saw jet, pitch, ink, and charcoal in the NYT Connections puzzle for July 16, 2026, and wondered how they fit together.