Looking for Wednesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them Where:
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?
Scroll slowly! Now we start with the hints and answers, and only the first bit here will be the official hint the game already tells you. The second one I will make up on my own to try and help you along further. The official hint to day is:
You can say that again!
My own hint for this is:
Double
I think you’ll understand that one soon enough.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
And so we begin the actual answers to the puzzle, starting with the spangram and then moving to the entire list of words itself. The spangram may be enough to get you started here, but if you want the full list, that will be later on. Today’s spangram is:
Repetition
And here’s where that lies on the board if you want to put it in first:
Now we move on to the actual list of answers to the puzzle, which has an interesting set of words this week with a common theme that may not be what you were expecting:
- POMPOM
- MURMUR
- COUSCOUS
- MAMA
- TUTU
- GOGO
So, as you can see these are words that are made up of the same two halves, repeated. Some of these were going to be very easy at baseline, like MAMA or TUTU. But once you get into MURMUR or COUSCOUS territory, you may start to struggle quite a bit.
This is an interesting puzzle because once you figure out the pattern, you can look for the letters that repeat, and those might lead you to the words. That’s how I found a lot of these and I only had to use a single hint the whole time. And it was actually hard to even find hint words because of how strange the letters were arrange.
I do think this was a pretty trick one, so if you came here for some hints and answers I certainly would not blame you. Hopefully this helped, and we will see you tomorrow for the next puzzle.
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