NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Wednesday, September 17

Looking for Tuesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Brace yourself for what could be a record long spangram. At least one of the biggest I’ve ever seen in my years doing this puzzle.
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?
Time to do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:
We beg to differ
And mine is:
Word pairs
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:
OPPOSITESATTRACT
Here it is on the page, and read on:
The answers are:
- RIGID
- FLEXIBLE
- BOLD
- TIMID
- QUIET
- NOISY
So yeah that’s a 16-letter spangram, which I’m not sure I’ve seen before. Clearly just the word opposites alone could have reached both sides from either direction, but they wanted to squeeze the puzzle to mostly be shorter words, I suppose. I’ll have to check the archives if that’s actually a record or not. What do you think? Can you remember a longer one?
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.