NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Sunday, July 21

Looking for hints, spangrams and answers for Saturday Strands? You can find them here:

ForbesNYT’s “Strands” Clues, Spangrams, and Answers for Saturday, July 20By Paul Tassi

No day off for us today, as there is another Strands puzzle to solve and you can solve it over breakfast this Sunday morning. But first…

How to play Strands

The New York Times’ Strands puzzle is a classic crossword game. It’s currently in beta, meaning it won’t be available unless enough people play it each day.

Every day you can play a new game of Strands. The game gives you a grid of six by eight letters. The goal is to find a group of words that have something in common, and you will get a clue on this theme. When you find a theme word, it remains highlighted in blue.

You will also need to find a special word called a spangram. This tells you what the words have in common. The spangram connects two opposite sides of the board. Although the words in the theme are not proper nouns, the spangram can be a proper noun. When you find the spangram, it remains highlighted in yellow.

Be warned: you will need to be on your guard.

“Some themes are sentence completions. They can also be steps in a process, items that all belong in the same category, synonyms or homophones,” notes the New York Times. “Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles over the course of a week, [Wordle and Strands editor Tracy] Bennett plans to throw curve balls at Strands solvers from time to time.

What is today’s Strands Index?

We’re going to do the NYT hint, and then my own hint to push you further after that:

Words starting with S? (A cutting-edge theme)

And mine is:

Weapons

What are today’s Strands responses?

Now we start the response part of the program which is the spangram and the full list, the spangram is:

BLADES

Here’s where it is:

And the rest of the answers:

• CUTLASS
• RAPIER
• KATANA
• CLAYMORE
• SCIMITAR
• MACHETE

So the word “swords” isn’t there at all, but it’s all about different types of blades or swords, though things like a MACHETE wouldn’t technically be classified as a sword. My years of medieval video gaming have allowed me to solve this puzzle perfectly, but I imagine it would be more difficult for some.

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