Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Welcome back to work and it’s immediately time to start slacking off to play some Strands. This time around, it’s something that’s very near and dear to the New York Times’ heart. 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?
First we’ll do the NYT hint for the day and then I will craft one of my own below that. Here is the hint for today:
Print edition
And my hint
News assembly
Kind of an easy guess as to what this is all going to be about, especially if you’re a New York Times reader.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we move on to the actual answer portion of things, so spoilers follow. We’ll start with the spangram and move on to the answers below that. Here’s the spangram.
NEWSPAPER
Wow I am SHOCKED I tell you! But yeah that was probably always going to be it. Here’s where it is on the board:
Now moving onto the rest of the answers, we have:
- FOLIO
- COLUMN
- BYLINE
- CAPTION
- PAGE
- ARTICLE
- FOLD
This may be harder for some if you don’t know a bunch of industry specific terms or if you’re doing all your reading online. For instance, FOLD is for when things go above or below the fold when a physical newspaper is folded, with the more important stuff on top. I guess that’s sort of the same with websites and scrolling now.
CAPTION is for photos, BYLINE is who wrote it. FOLIO is…actually I have to look that up. It’s for print newspapers, the style of paper that’s one giant piece folded in half. Really weird people still use these.
So that’s the puzzle, maybe a trickier one this time around.
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