Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
This is probably the hardest Strands that I’ve done since I started playing, not that the game is all that old at this point.
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.
Be warned: You’ll need to be on your toes.
“Some themes are fill-in-the-blank phrases. They may also be steps in a process, items that all belong to the same category, synonyms or homophones,” The New York Times notes. “Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles within a week, [Wordle and Strands editor Tracy] Bennett plans to throw Strands solvers curveballs every once in a while.”
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
Scroll slow. The official hint for the puzzle can be found below and I am going to invent a second one that helps you further after that. The official theme hint for today’s Strand puzzle is…
In my kingdom
And my own hint? I guess I’m perhaps being overly helpful here but…
Charles Darwin
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Spoilers follow. Here are the answers, starting with the spangram and then moving into the full list of all the puzzle worlds. This may also be a word you have to look up by itself if you don’t actually know what it is.
TAXONOMY
That fits into the grid from one side to the other right here:
The full answer list is:
- CLASS
- GENUS
- SPECIES
- DOMAIN
- ORDER
- PHYLUM
- FAMILY
This entire puzzle depends on whether or not you know the Linnean system of biological classification which uses all these terms to group different types of organisms together, and how they trace back to one another or are classified together. TAXONOMY, the spangram, is that science of classification. Most of these are “normal” words but you may stumble at really hard ones like PHYLUM. Or GENUS may not have come to mind either. It’s a tough one and really specialty-knowledge dependant.
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