Looking for Tuesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Hola, Strandistas! ¿Cómo están ustedes hoy?
I’m fine, thanks. It’s another beautiful windy day, and I’m putting off yard work by doing actual work, which is a guilt-free way of getting out of chores. Besides, I picked an hour’s worth of dandelions yesterday. Those things grow like weeds!
In any case, it’s time to solve a very challenging Strands puzzle, so let’s dive right in! Hints and the answers are below.
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.
Strands still isn’t on the New York Times games app, but you can play it right here.
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
Scroll slowly! Just after the hint for today’s Strands puzzle, I’ll reveal what the answer words are.
The official theme hint for today’s Strand puzzle is: Can you digit?
Here’s an extra hint to help guide you to the solution: PRIME _______.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Strands answers.
Today’s Spangram
I’ll first tell you the spangram and show you where that is on the grid. I’ll then tell you the other words and show you how they fit in.
This is your final warning!
Today’s Strands spangram is . . .
NUMBERS
Here’s where the Spangram is on the grid:
All Today’s Strands Hints and Answers
To solve the answers, you really have to have the spangram because there’s not an obvious theme at all. I was almost finished with my word search before it clicked for me. The trick is to not think about a unifying theme or think of this literally. Just add the spangram to the end of each answer you have and you’ll see the pattern. For instance, the first word is “Dance” as in “Dance Numbers”. The rest will follow.
If you need extra help, spoilers below!
Here’s the full list of words:
- Dance
- Bacon
- Telephone
- Serial
- Whole
- Lucky
- Binary
Today’s Strands Breakdown
Yesterday’s Strands clue was “Can you dig it?” and had to do with heavy metals. Today’s is “Can you digit?” (haha, very clever) and has to do with words you add the word “Numbers” to. This confused me for quite a bit. I found BINARY first and quite quickly but then I was looking for other words that had to do with numbers or coding or digital programming or whatever, and that was wrong. I found DANCE next and BACON after that, at which point I had no clue what was going on. How do binary, dance and bacon all fit together?
Even when I found the spangram next, I didn’t really understand what NUMBERS had to do with bacon or dance. Bacon was the trick here. It has to do with the whole “Seven degrees of Kevin Bacon”. Your “bacon number” is how many people you know between you and Kevin Bacon, as in I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Kevin Bacon (Bacon #4). This is an application of the Erdős number concept. Effectively, the higher the degree of separation between a person and Kevin Bacon, the higher the Bacon number.
So I was not expecting that in my Strands puzzle today! Once I started finding words like LUCKY and WHOLE everything started to click, but it was still tough to find SERIAL. The last word I snagged was TELEPHONE.
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!
