Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here.
It’s Sunday, a week after Easter, so no theme puzzles this time around. Rather, we have a new Strands letter jumble to sort through, and this one is on the harder side I would say, if we’re measuring them in one big pile. Here are some hints and answers, 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?
You may want to start scrolling slowly. This is where hints and answers start, so if you took a wrong turn and ended up here, you may want to head back where you came from.
The official hint for the Strands puzzle today is…
This’ll all blow over
My own personal hint today is going to be:
We all float down here
What can I say, I like Stephen King.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now are getting into full spoiler territory with the spangram and answers to the puzzle itself. First we’ll start with the spangram and if that’s not enough for you, we can move to the full answers. The spangram is:
LIGHTWEIGHT
That’s a rare one that goes top to bottom instead of across, and here’s how that’s going to sit on the page:
Now we have the full list of answers below:
- EYELASH
- STRAW
- PAPER
- FEATHER
- BUBBLE
- BALLOON
So, these are all things that are A) lightweight and B) tend to get blown away, which is a pretty random category that I had a really hard time nailing down. Ironically, while you can spell LIGHTWEIGHT for the spangram, you can also connect FEATHER to spell FEATHERWEIGHT instead, which really confused me that it wasn’t one of the words. Figured it out eventually, I suppose.
The rest were still pretty hard and I used a lot of hints. I was not going to spot EYELASH on my own, for instance. BUBBLE and BALLOON were pretty easy, though all the double letters, including triple Bs, were confusing at first. I am not sure how they think of categories like this as it’s so random. I wonder if they’re asking AI for ideas these days.
So yeah, I would put this on the harder side of puzzles I’ve done, just because of the obscure category. Hopefully the hints and answers helped, see you next time.
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