NYT 'Strands' Hints, Spangram And Answers For Saturday, May 18

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

ForbesToday's NYT 'Strands' Hints, Spangram And Answers For Friday, May 17By Kris Holt

Strands has returned for the weekend, and even if you're not sitting around the office, you are certainly still within your rights to play, even if it cuts into your leisure time. Lucky for you, this puzzles is really easy and should not take you much time at all. But first...

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.

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Every letter is used once in one of the theme words and spangram. You can connect letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and it's possible to switch directions in the middle of a word. If you're playing on a touchscreen, double tap the last letter to submit your guess.

If you find three valid words of at least four letters that are not part of the theme, you'll unlock the Hint button. Clicking this will highlight the letters that make up one of the theme words.

Be warned: You'll need to be on your toes. Sometimes you'll need to fill the missing word(s) in a phrase. On other days, the game may revolve around synonyms or homophones. The difficulty will vary from day to day, and the puzzle creators will try to surprise you sometimes.

What Is Today's Strands Hint?

We will start with the official Strands hint from the NYT itself, and I will then give me own hint to make things a bit more clear. The official hint today is:

Part of the Equation

My hint is:

You don't need a second hint this is way too easy, what has "equations"?

What Are Today's Strands Answers?

Time to move on to the spangram, something I got almost immediately, and I think you might too. Here is is, so be warned, spoilers follow:

MATHEMATICS

Yeah, I mean, I was going to do MATH as a four letter hint, but the rest of it seemed pretty obvious to reach the other side of the board:

Strands

Here are the other answers that will fill up the rest of the board. Many are what you'd expect:

• DIVIDE
• CALCULATE
• MULTIPLY
• SUBTRACT
• DERIVE

A surprise was that while the list has DIVIDE, MULTIPLY and SUBTRACT, ADDITION wasn't on here, but you only have so many letters. And ADD is way too short.

The only one here I struggled with at all was DERIVE, a mathematical term to be sure, but one that is a bit more complicated than the other four. I will admit to cheating a bit here and using a word unscrambler to get it, as it was taking forever.

All in all a really easy puzzle minus one word that gave me some trouble. Hope you enjoyed playing and the hints here.

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