NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Monday, May 12

Looking for Sunday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:

ForbesNYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Sunday, May 11By Paul Tassi

Time to start the week with some Strands and honestly, I think this one is going to be pretty tough, from its hint to the list of words to its spangram. But we’ll see how you do.

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:

A little respect

And mine is:

Who you are at your core

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:

STREETCRED

And here’s where that lies on the board:

And the answers are:

• STATURE
• NAME
• CHARACTER
• REPUTATION
• STANDING

I genuinely had a hard time trying to connect the NYT hint to the board, as it’s pretty vague and it’s a hyper-specific category based on reputation with STREETCRED as the somewhat unexpected spangram. Once you go through the list you can understand what they were going for, but solving this at the time? Pretty trick. STANDING and NAME were two that I would not immediately link to this idea, while the reset were a little more obvious.

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