Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Time for another Strands entry, and this time around we have a deceptively easy puzzle that turned me around quite a bit. 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?
Let’s start with the official NYT hint of the day and then move on to one of my own to give you more help. The official hint is:
Hold up…
And my hint
Up up and away
You may understand what the clue is pretty quickly, but many hints and two word unscramblers later, here I am. And here you are.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
We will start with the spangram and then move on to the rest of the answers below that. The spangram is:
ALLRISE
This was tricky as the two-for-ones tend to be. Here’s where that goes on the board:
Now we have the full list of answers below:
- ELEVATE
- EXALT
- LIFT
- SUPPORT
- HOIST
- BOOST
- LEVITATE
LEVIATE was driving me nuts because I kept trying to find ELEVATE in there but it wouldn’t fit, so I felt pretty dumb when I found it in the other corner. I kept looking for RAISE but it wasn’t in there.
Rather, we had some trickier words like EXALT which is not exactly something you’re using every day. I thought SUPPORT was pushing the definition of the theme here, but I suppose you can support in multiple directions, including up.
Tough one for me today, maybe you did better!
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