Looking for Sunday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Looking for help with today’s New York Times Strands puzzle? You’ve come to the right place. Whether you’re stuck on a tricky clue, trying to spot the spangram, or just need a little nudge to get going, this daily guide offers hints, clues, and full answers to keep your streak alive. We’ll walk you through the puzzle step by step without spoiling everything upfront—so you can solve at your own pace.
NYT Strands Monday, July 21st Guide
It’s Monday . . . again. This keeps happening! Every week! Time truly is a flat circle. The work week has arrived and the weekend is behind us, but don’t worry. It’ll be Saturday soon enough. In the meantime, we have another Strands puzzle to solve, words to uncover and a spangram to find. Read on for rules of play or skip ahead for extra hints to help you with today’s grid, as well as answers and the completed puzzle.
How To Play Strands
Strands is a daily word puzzle from The New York Times that challenges your vocabulary and pattern-recognition skills. Here’s how it works:
The Goal
Find all the hidden theme words in the grid. Every puzzle has a theme, and the words you need to find will relate to it. Some themes are incredibly obvious, while others require more creative thinking. Generally you’ll need to find between 5 to 9 words in total.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
The Spangram
One special word—called the spangram—will stretch across two or more sides of the grid and tie directly into the theme. It’s key to unlocking the puzzle, tying together all the other words and reinforcing the daily theme.
Finding Words
- Words must be at least four letters long.
- Words can be formed by dragging through adjacent letters (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally).
- You can change direction as you trace a word, but you can’t reuse the same letter tile in a single word.
Here’s what a completed Strands puzzle looks like. The spangram is in yellow:
Helpful Hints
- Each time you find three non-theme words, you’ll earn a hint that highlights a theme word’s first letter.
- Use hints wisely to uncover trickier theme words.
Finishing the Puzzle
Once you find all theme words—including the spangram—you win the game! Play today’s puzzle right here.
Spoilers ahead.
Today’s Strands Hints
Read on for today’s theme and some hints to help you uncover today’s words. Before I reveal the answers, I’ll give you the first two letters of each word to help you get started.
Today’s Theme: I fold!
Hint: This is not about poker hands.
Clue: Think paper creations.
Here are the first two letters of each word:
- FI
- CR
- BO
- FR
- KI
- BU
- HE
- FL
- OR
Remember, spoilers ahead!
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Today’s spangram is: ORIGAMI
Here’s the full list of words:
- FISH
- CRANE
- BOAT
- FROG
- KITE
- BUTTERFLY
- HEART
- FLOWER
Here’s the completed Strands grid:
Today’s Strands Breakdown
The real challenge today was the sheer number of words, though most of them were quite short. As soon as I’d found BOAT and CRANE, I knew this was about ORIGAMI, though it took a few more words before I found the spangram. After that, it was just a matter of patience and some trial and error.
How did you do on your Strands today? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.
Be sure to check out my blog for my daily Wordle guides as well as all my other writing about TV shows, streaming guides, movie reviews, video game coverage and much more. Thanks for stopping by!
