Looking for Sunday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
I set a speed record for how fast I solved the puzzle this week, so we’ll see if you fare better or not. But if not that’s okay and I have some hints for you coming up. 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?
We will start with the official hint and then move on to one that I craft myself to make things a bit more clear. The official hint is
In a(n)…
And my hint is:
Just a sec
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Time to start with the spangram, then the full list of answers after that. The spangram is:
SMALLTIME
And is found on the board here:
The full list of answers is:
- TICK
- SECOND
- MINUTE
- FLASH
- JIFFY
- INSTANT
- MOMENT
Once I figured out it was going to be all instances of time, everything else fell into place, even if it was the spangram itself that came last. Honestly that spangram would have been a pretty clever hint itself. Some are real units of time like MINUTE or SECOND, but anything past that is not going to be “small time” like an hour. Others are more turns of phrase like in a TICK, which I’m pretty sure is British, and in a JIFFY, which I’m pretty sure if from the ‘50s.
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