Strands Answer Yesterday (October 19, 2026)

What to check on a finished board

Five things are worth a look once you know the answer, whether you solved it or not:

• The clue against the spangram. Read the clue again now that you know the theme; most clues are a pun or a sideways description, and seeing how it pointed at the answer helps with the next one.
• The theme words you missed. The traced board above shows each one in place, so you can see the path you did not try.
• Where the spangram ran. By the game's rules it touches two opposite sides of the board and may be more than one word, so it cuts across everything else.
• The leftover letters. The rules say theme words fill the board entirely and never overlap, so a cluster you never used was always part of an answer.
• The number of theme words. It varies from day to day; knowing how many you were hunting for changes when to stop and take a hint.
• The spangram's length. Long spangrams such as ONTHEWATERFRONT are phrases; if yours was a phrase, the theme was probably described rather than named.

The day boundary, and a three-hour overlap

Strands loads the puzzle for the date on your device, so the game moves to a new board at your own midnight. HintSheet publishes each date's board at midnight Eastern time and prints the date on every page.

The two clocks disagree for part of the evening in the western United States. From 9 p.m. Pacific our current Strands page has already moved on, which means the board labelled as the previous one here is the board still live in your game until midnight. If you are mid-puzzle, look at the date above the grid before reading further.

Further east the effect reverses: players in Europe start a new board hours before our page turns over, so their "yesterday" is still shown as current here for a while.

None of this changes the board itself. The Strands answer yesterday for a given date is the same grid, clue and spangram for every player; only the moment it stops being current differs.

Tracing the spangram after the fact

The spangram is the one answer the game defines by position: the Times' rules say it touches two opposite sides of the board, and the theme words fill the board entirely with no overlaps. That makes it the best place to start when you go back over a finished board. Find the spangram's two ends on opposite edges and follow it across; every letter it does not use belongs to a theme word, so the rest of the board divides into the groups around it.

If you missed theme words on the day, that division is usually where they were. A region the spangram walls off has to be filled by theme words alone, so the letters left in it after you mark the words you did find are the ones you missed, and they have to join into words that fit the clue. Working it backwards like this, with the answer page open beside you, shows how the board was built and makes the next one quicker to read.

Reading the clue once you know the answer

The clue is the hardest part of most boards, and the Strands answer yesterday is the best place to study it, because the answer is already in front of you. Read the clue, then the spangram, and work out the bridge between them.

Three boards from our archive show the usual moves. On 1 September 2026 the clue "Called by your calling" led to the spangram WORKINGTITLE, with DETECTIVE, DOCTOR, OFFICER, PROFESSOR and RABBI as theme words — titles people use because of their jobs. On 11 September "Harbor view" became ONTHEWATERFRONT, a phrase rather than a single word. On 15 October "Sailor's guide" pointed at LIGHTHOUSE, with its parts — BEACON, DOME, GALLERY, LANTERN, STAIRCASE, TOWER — as the theme words.

In each case the clue describes the theme from an angle rather than naming it. When you replay a board in your head, ask which word of the clue was doing the work: "calling" in the first, "view" in the second, "guide" in the third.

How the previous board compared with the rest

Theme-word counts move around more than people expect. Across the fifty boards from 1 September to 20 October 2026, five and six theme words were by far the most common, but consecutive days had the same count only 20 times in 49 — so yesterday's count tells you little about today's.

Words can come back, too, in a different role: LIGHTHOUSE was a theme word on 11 September 2026, under the clue "Harbor view", and the spangram on 15 October 2026, under "Sailor's guide". It was the only repeated answer in the window.

The practical lesson is to count, not assume. The game tells you how many theme words a board holds once you start finding them, and that number is the only reliable guide; yesterday's count, or last week's, says nothing about the next one.

Hints you earned, and hints you used

The game's rules set out the hint system: "For every 3 non-theme words you find, you earn a hint," and a hint shows the letters of a theme word — or, if a hint is already active, that word's letter order. Looking back at the Strands answer yesterday, you can work out which theme word a hint would most likely have saved you on: the one you found last, or never found at all.

That is also a useful honesty check. If the word you could not find is short, a hint was probably the right call; if it was the spangram, the clue was the real obstacle, and the section above on reading clues is the better practice.

Older boards, and the Times' own archive

The Strands archive lists every board we have published with its date and number. The number is the one the game shows when you share a result: Strands No. 1 was the board of 4 March 2024, so the previous board's number is always one below the current one.

The Times lists a "Strands Archive" in the game's menu, at nytimes.com/games/strands/archive, where earlier boards can be played rather than just read; its subscription offers promote access to its puzzle archives. For the current board, the Strands answer page has the solution and the hint page stages it.

Every dated Strands page on HintSheet links to the boards on either side of it, so once you have the previous board open you can step back a day at a time without returning to the archive list.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Strands answers

Every past puzzle is in the Strands archive. New here? Start with the Strands guide.