NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Saturday, August 23, 2025
Looking for Friday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
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]
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Bennett plans to throw Strands solvers curveballs every once in a while.”
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
Time to do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:
Rub it in why don’t you?
And mine is:
Silky smooth
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we begin the answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list of the other answers, the spangram is:
MOISTURIZERS
Here it is on the page, and read on:
The answers are:
- BALM
- CREAM
- BUTTER
- SERUM
- LOTION
- JELLY
- SALVE
I got this puzzle perfect, albeit I did get a few accidental hint words attempting to get all the way to the plural of moisturizer. Besides that, I may not use any of these products (which is almost certainly a bad thing for the aging process now hitting me like a truck) but I know enough about them to at least find all the rather short words hidden around the puzzle here. People put “serums” on themselves? Really?
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