Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Strands puzzles are getting harder lately, if you ask me, and this is two days in a row now that I’ve struggled with a puzzle to some extent. Hopefully I can give you some help here today.
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?
First we will start with the official hint from the NYT and then I will give you one of my own that I think will help you along further. The official hint is:
Keep on keeping on
And mine is:
Inner strength
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we move on to the answers for the day and spoilers will follow, so be careful. We will start with the spangram and move on to the full list. The spangram is:
STAYSTRONG
And here’s where that lies on the board:
And the answers are:
- SURVIVE
- PERSIST
- PERSEVERE
- LAST
- ENDURE
- ABIDE
I really struggled with this one, as it was hard to wrap my head around the theme, and once I did, thinking of all the possible answers, some of these being pretty long indeed, was also additionally difficult. Words like ABIDE or LAST didn’t really cross my mind and before I knew what the theme was I tried to enter SALT about a million times. I guess I just needed to STAYSTRONG in order to finish this puzzle.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.