Looking for Tuesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
It’s not only Wednesday, it’s also the 4th of December. This means that we’re just 3 weeks away from Christmas. 21 days. That’s kind of crazy to think about. I have lost all perspective when it comes to time. The days and weeks and months and years all wash over me and some things that seem long ago were actually just earlier this year, and some things that seem like just yesterday were ages ago, in another life. I think this is a symptom of writing a guide every day of the year, year after year. You are made to think about time the same way when you repeat a word over and over and over again it starts to lose meaning.
But I digress. We’re here to solve today’s very tricky, very perplexing Strands, so let’s go solve it!
Strands is the newest game in the New York Times’ stable of puzzle games. It’s a fun twist on classic word search games. Every day we’re given a new theme and then tasked with uncovering all the words on the grid that fit that theme, including a spangram that spans two sides of the board. One of these words is the spangram which crosses from one side of the grid to another and reveals even more about the day’s theme.
Spoilers ahead.
Today’s Strands Hints
Today’s Theme: I now pronounce you . . .
Hint #1: Not man and wife. Don’t think marriage.
Hint #2: Think accents. How words are pronounced.
Instead of giving you the first two letters of each word, I give you a list of symbols to help you on your path.
Remember, spoilers ahead!
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Today’s spangram is: DIACRITICS
Here’s the full list of words:
- UMLAUT
- TILDE
- ACUTE
- GRAVE
- CEDILLA
- CIRCUMFLEX
Here’s the completed Strands grid:
Today’s Strands Breakdown
Diacritical marks are what we’re after today, and that is some pretty tricky Stranding that certainly left me baffled for a spell. ACUTE and GRAVE have nothing to do with matrimonial affairs! I really was thrown off by the very clever theme today. That’s a good thing. I thought maybe I was looking at some kind of twist on pronouncing “man and wife”. Perhaps it was going dark with “pronounced dead”—hence the GRAVE. It wasn’t until I uncovered TILDE that I realized where I’d gone wrong.
I’d already seen the word CRITICS but it didn’t stick, but once I found TILDE I searched backwards and quickly found DIA to snap on the front, nabbing the spangram. From here it was just a matter of unscrambling the remaining three words, though this was still tricky. None of these are words we use on a daily basis, unless you’re in the business of chatting about UMLAUTS and flexing your knowledge of CIRCUMFLEXes and CEDILLAs.
How did you do on your Strands today? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.
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