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

ForbesNYT “Strands” tips and answers for Sunday, December 8thFrom Kris Holt

Hello! I hope you had a great weekend and are ready for the week ahead.

Today NYT strands Hints, Spangram and answers for Monday December 9th coming soon.

How to play Strands

The New York Times’ strands Puzzle is a classic word search game. It is available on the NYT website and in the NYT Games app alongside similar things Wordle And Connections (which we also cover in Forbes Games daily guides).

There’s a new game strands to play every day. The game presents you with a letter grid of six by eight letters. The goal is to find a group of words that have something in common and give you a clue as to what the topic is. When you find a topic word, it remains highlighted in blue.

You also need to find a special word called Spangram. This will tell you what the words have in common. The spangram connects at least two sides of the board, but may not start or end there. While the topic words are not a proper noun, the spangram can be a proper noun. When you find the Spangram, it will remain highlighted in yellow.

Each letter is used once in one of the topic words and in the Spangram. You can connect letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally and change direction in the middle of a word. If you’re playing on a touchscreen, double-tap the last letter to place your guess.

Finding three valid off-topic words with at least four letters will unlock the Hint button. Clicking on it will highlight the letters that make up one of the topic words.

Be warned: you must be on your guard. Sometimes you need to fill in the missing words in a phrase. Other days the game might revolve around synonyms or homophones. The difficulty varies from day to day and the puzzle creators will sometimes try to surprise you.

What is today’s Strands clue?

Scroll slowly! Right after the note for today strands Riddle, I will reveal the answer words.

The official topic note for today Beach Mystery is…

Calm at first

Do you need additional help? Here’s another hint…

No noise at the beginning

There are Seven Topic words found today including the spangram.

What are today’s NYT Strands picks?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today strands Notes.

Here are the first two letters of each theme word in today’s puzzle. They are sorted from left to right and then top to bottom by each letter of the word that appears for the first time:

What are today’s NYT Strands answers?

Before I tell the other person the full word list, I’ll first tell you about the Spangram and show you where it is in the grid.

This is yours Final spoiler warning!

Today strands Spangram is…

SILENT LETTER

Here you can find it in the grid…

Today strands Theme words are…

• MNEMONIC
• ANKLE
• SILENT LETTER
• HONESTY
• GNOMES
• WRAP
• PSALM

This is what the finished grid looks like…

I thought STEW in the bottom right might be a theme word, but alas. Then I found WRAP in the same corner and figured out what was going on – the first letter is silent. GNOME at the bottom left has confirmed this. “Silent” seemed to be the beginning of Spangram, but “Silent One” wasn’t and I couldn’t see any other option at that point – the solution was right there! After PSALM, I made a lot of guesses because I didn’t see anything.

I used three clues and the Spangram was the last topic word I found.

That’s all for today strands Hints and answers. Be sure to check out my blog for tips and the walkthrough for Tuesday’s game if you need them.

If you feel like it, please do it Follow my blog for more coverage of strands and other puns, as well as video game news, insight, and analysis. It helps me a lot! Keep following me too Bluesky! It’s fun there.