Looking for Sunday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Happy Monday, it’s time to slack off of work and do some Strands. Or Connections. Wordle. Or the entire NYT Crossword. They are like the anti-productivity masters over there. Somewhat easier puzzle today I think, but a fun one. But first…
How To Play Strands
The New York Times’ Strands puzzle is a play on the classic word search. It’s in beta for now, which means it’ll only stick around if enough people play it every day.
There’s a new game of Strands to play every day. The game will present you with a six by eight grid of letters. The aim is to find a group of words that have something in common, and you’ll get a clue as to what that theme is. When you find a theme word, it will remain highlighted in blue.
You’ll also need to find a special word called a spangram. This tells you what the words have in common. The spangram links two opposite sides of the board. While the theme words will not be a proper name, the spangram can be a proper name. When you find the spangram, it will remain highlighted in yellow.
Every letter is used once in one of the theme words and spangram. You can connect letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and it’s possible to switch directions in the middle of a word. If you’re playing on a touchscreen, double tap the last letter to submit your guess.
If you find three valid words of at least four letters that are not part of the theme, you’ll unlock the Hint button. Clicking this will highlight the letters that make up one of the theme words.
Be warned: You’ll need to be on your toes. Sometimes you’ll need to fill the missing word(s) in a phrase. On other days, the game may revolve around synonyms or homophones. The difficulty will vary from day to day, and the puzzle creators will try to surprise you sometimes.
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
We will start with the official hint of the day and then I will add my own that I think is a bit more helpful. But theirs is rather clever today, I’ll admit. Here’s the normal hint:
Name Dropping
And here’s mine:
80-00s
That should be enough to get you started I think, and now we will move on to the actual answers.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Scroll slowly! We’ll start with the board-crossing spangram and then move into some more detailed answers to the rest of the words. The spangram this week is:
MUSICIANS
And here’s where that will be slotted into the board for you:
The rest of the answers for this week are as follows:
- PINK
- JEWEL
- PRINCE
- COMMON
- MEATLOAF
- BRANDY
- SEAL
So, you get it, right? These are singers who only go by a single name, rather than their last name as well. My first hint got me PINK, so I thought maybe it was just a list of celebrities, but by the time I saw JEWEL, I understood what they were doing with the whole name-dropping idea.
The ones I immediately thought of were MADONNA, BEYONCE and ZENDAYA but none of those were on there. This is a list that spans the 80s, 90s and 00s (Pink’s debut album was 2000, for one), but it is obviously missing a few big names. There are only so many letters you can use on a board like this I guess.
I will say by the time I finished this puzzle I had an itch to listen to “I Would Do Anything for Love” or “Kiss from a Rose,” so I am going to go do that now. Hope this helped you out!
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
