Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
A canine-based puzzle today, but it will test your knowledge of a certain kind of breed, many of which no longer fulfill their original purpose at all for most owners.
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.”
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
Time to do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:
Barking up the right tree
And mine is:
Got their scent
Today’s NYT Strands Opening Letters
Here are the first two letters of all the words if you don’t want the entire thing just yet.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we begin the answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list of the other answers, the spangram is:
HUNTINGBREEDS
Here it is on the page, and read on:
The answers are:
- POINTER
- SPANIEL
- RETRIEVER
- TERRIER
- HOUND
While obviously there is still a lot of hunting done in the world, and even a lot of it involving dogs (uh, helping, dogs helping), it remains a fact that a lot of these breeds are currently far from their original jobs. It would not have occurred to me at all that a Spaniel was a hunting dog these days, and you may not remember that retrievers used to retrieve more than just tennis balls and frisbees.
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