Looking for Sunday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
We are going old-school today in terms of written communication that is a lot harder than it may seem at 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.
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?
Time to do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:
The write stuff
And mine is:
A specific tool
What Are Today’s Strands Answer Hints?
Here are the first two letters of each answer to get you started
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we begin the actual answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list of the other answers, the spangram is:
PENCILMEIN
Here it is on the page, and read on:
The answers are:
- GRAPHITE
- SHARPENER
- CEDARWOOD
- ERASER
- REFILL
It was clear from the jump that the answers were going to be related to writing, but what I did not expect was there to be a link to just one specific type of writing tool, the pencil. And an old-school pencil at that, one I haven’t used since probably fourth grade. I’m sure kids today never use them. REFILL is not one you would not guess would be in here. I had so much trouble with CEDARWOOD I literally asked an AI that could also not figure it out. It kept giving me REDWOOD, CA. No! Bad AI! Anyway, we got there.
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