Today's NYT Strands Hints (and Answer) for Sunday, July 28, 2024

If you’re looking for hints and answers for Strands for Sunday, July 28, 2024, read on—I’ll share some clues and tips, and finally the solution to the puzzle with the theme “Daily delivery.”

For an easy way to come back to our Strands hints every day, bookmark this page. You can also find our past hints there as well, in case you want to know what you missed in a previous puzzle.

Below, I’ll give you some oblique hints at today’s Strands answers. And farther down the page, I’ll reveal the spangram and the answers. Scroll slowly and take just the hints you need!

Today's NYT Strands Hints (and Answer) for Sunday, July 28, 2024

Credit: Strands/NYT

Hint for the spangram in today’s Strands puzzle

What’s a (now sorta retro) thing that’s usually associated with a daily IRL delivery—most stereotypically, by a local neighborhood kid on a bicycle?

Hint for the theme words in today’s Strands puzzle

Think about the kinds of words that tend to follow a city’s name in the title of a local publication.

BEWARE: Spoilers follow for today’s Strands puzzle!

We’re about to give away the answers to today’s Strands puzzle.

What is the spangram in today’s Strands?

Today’s spangram is NEWSPAPER.

What are the theme words in today’s Strands?

The theme words today are: JOURNAL, HERALD, GLOBE, TRIBUNE, CHRONICLE, TIMES.

Here’s what the board looks like when the puzzle is solved:

Credit: Strands/NYT

How I solved today’s Strands

I assume today’s category will be related to the newspaper in some way, as that’s the product I most closely associate with a “daily delivery.”

I spot the word JOURNAL in the upper left corner, and it’s a hit. 🔵 Perhaps like The Wall Street Journal?

I see the word NEW trailing down the side of JOURNAL, and I follow it down the puzzle to create the spangram: NEWSPAPER. 🟡 Got it, so we’re looking for words often associated with the titles of newspapers.

TIMES is in the bottom right. 🔵

TRIBUNE sits to the right of the spangram. 🔵

CHRONICLE completes the right-hand side. 🔵

HERALD runs the left-hand side. 🔵

Lastly, GLOBE. 🔵

How to play Strands

You can find the Strands game on the New York Times website and in the NYT Games app.

When you start playing, you’ll see a game board with an assortment of letters, flanked by a clue that gives a hint at the board’s theme—this will be a phrase, like “Better with age.” Your job is to find the hidden words within the board that reflect the puzzle’s theme.

A crossword crossed with a word search

The most important word to find is the “spangram,” a word that more explicitly states the puzzle’s theme. (For example, the spangram for the puzzle with the theme "Better with age" is FERMENTED, which describes products that are, you guessed it, get better with age.) The spangram will span the entire game board, either from left to right or top to bottom (hence the name). When you find the spangram, it will be highlighted in yellow. Solving the spangram usually makes the rest of the puzzle much easier to complete.

In Strands, words can travel any direction (up, down, left, right, and diagonal), and you will only use each letter once. There is only one correct solution. When you correctly identify one of the puzzle’s words (for example, KOMBUCHA, MISO, or KIMCHI), it will be highlighted in blue.

If you are struggling to solve the puzzle, you can submit any non-theme words you see (as long as they are four letters or more) to receive credit toward a single hint. If you submit three non-theme words, the “Hint” button will be clickable; if you click it, all of the letters in one of the theme words will be highlighted for you. You will still have to link these highlighted letters in the right order to form one of the theme words. If there is already a hint on the board and you use another hint before solving for that word, that word’s letter order will be revealed.

How to win Strands

Unlike Connections and Wordle, you cannot fail Strands. When you submit guesses, you will either correctly identify an answer, receive credit toward a hint, or the text will shake back and forth, indicating that the word you submitted is too short or not valid. You can't run out of guesses, and there is no time limit.

You win when you’ve correctly used all the letters on the board, meaning that you have identified the spangram and all of the theme words. Like other NYT games, upon solving the puzzle, you will see a shareable card that indicates how you performed that day: blue dots 🔵 indicate theme words you found, the yellow dot 🟡 indicates when you found the spangram, and a lightbulb 💡 indicates words that you received a hint for.

After discovering that today's Strands theme is associated with local publications, you might consider words that frequently follow a city's name in their titles, such as 'Journal' or 'Times'. If you're reminiscing about the past, you may also recall the term 'newspaper', which was traditionally delivered daily and often involved a neighborhood kid on a bicycle.