Daily hints · NYT Strands

NYT Strands archive

Strands is a word search with a theme, plus a spangram that crosses the whole board and names it. We keep the theme hint, the spangram hint and the individual word nudges apart, because those three give away wildly different amounts and most people want only one of them. Reading a past day is oddly instructive: a theme that felt impossible usually turns out to have been fairly clued.

2 past days published, covering August 10, 2026 to August 11, 2026. Each page carries the full hint set and the answers in the open.

How Strands works

A board six letters wide and eight tall, a themed clue, and one spangram that runs from one side of the grid to the opposite side and names the theme outright. Every letter on the board belongs to exactly one theme word, so a finished grid is completely spoken for. There is no guess limit and no penalty. Finding three ordinary words of four letters or more that are not part of the theme earns a hint instead.

What a dated page holds

Each date carries the clue as the Times printed it, the complete answer list with the spangram marked in amber, and the hints as published: the theme hint first, then the nudge written for each individual word. Answers sit in the open on these pages rather than behind a reveal, because somebody who opened a dated page has already asked for them.

What builds up here

Old boards read differently from live ones. A theme that seemed arbitrary at seven in the morning almost always turns out to have been clued precisely, and noticing that repeatedly is the quickest route to getting better at the live puzzle. The spangram is where most of that lesson sits, because it is the answer that had to carry the theme.

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