Looking for Friday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them Where:
It’s officially my turn to take over the reins of Strands at Forbes here for the week, and I found myself staring at an unusually hard puzzle, one that I had to do something I never thought I’d need to in order to solve a puzzle. I am ashamed. More on that later, 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?
Scroll slowly! This is the point in the article where the hints begin, followed by the answers shortly thereafter. We will start with the official hint, which I found somewhat useless this week, and I’ll add one of my own:
Call Me?
And my own hint would be:
Honorifics
I think my hint is much better than the original one, but you can be the judge of that.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
We will start with the spangram and move on to the full list of answers. This was a short one this week and arranged across the board in a way I’d never seen before. Very simple. The spangram is:
TITLES
And here’s how it looks on the board:
Now we move on to the list of answers, which are listed below:
- REVEREND
- QUEEN
- SENATOR
- PROFESSOR
- DOCTOR
- ADMIRAL
Yeah okay so this one really through me for a loop. The first thing when I saw the hint “Call Me?” was the Carly Rae Jepsen song, so I searched for “Maybe,” which unsurprisingly was not in there. I had to use a whole lot of hints to get the first few words, QUEEN, DOCTOR, SENATOR before I realized where they were going with this, that these are words that are titles (hence the spangram) that you would call someone.
I got PROFESSOR and REVERED on my own, but the jumble of letters that was ADMIRAL made me do something I never do, just type the letters into Google and say “unscramble” like I was playing Scrabble or something. That got me Admiral. I am embarassed.
I am curious what everyone makes of this puzzle this week. I found it really hard but maybe some of you got it more quickly than I did. Let me know in the comments.
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