Strands Solver

Today’s Strands Answers — October 17, 2026 →

Published answer list and spangram for today’s puzzle.

How to Use the Strands Solver

1. Open your Strands puzzle in the NYT Games app or on the NYT website.
2. Copy the grid — each row of letters on its own line. You can include spaces (S P R I N G), commas (S,P,R,I,N,G), or paste letters with no separators at all (SPRING).
3. Paste into the box above. Results appear automatically as you type (toggle off if you prefer).
4. Browse words grouped by length. Click any word to copy it. Tap the − button next to a word to hide it — useful when you've already found it on the board and want to focus on what's left.
5. Check the Spangram candidates panel for words that touch two opposite edges — that's how NYT defines the spangram in Strands.
6. Copy all copies every remaining (non-excluded) word to your clipboard, one per line.

How the Strands Solver Works

Under the hood this is a word-search solver tuned for Strands-style puzzles. It runs entirely in your browser, so there is no server round-trip, no upload, and no waiting.

1. Parse the grid. Your pasted letters become a rectangular board. Spaces, commas, and unseparated letters all normalize to the same grid, so copy-paste from anywhere just works.
2. Build the search index. On page load, the ~172,000-word ENABLE dictionary is organized into a prefix trie, so the search can abandon a branch the moment it can no longer form a word.
3. Walk every path. From every cell, the solver explores all 8 directions (horizontal, vertical, and both diagonals), never revisiting a cell within one word, and pruning against the trie at each step.
4. Flag spangram candidates. Any word whose path touches two opposite edges is marked as a spangram candidate — the same rule NYT uses for the daily Strands puzzle.
5. Present the results. Words are grouped by length, sorted longest-first, clickable to copy, and individually excludable when you've already found them on the board.

Typical performance: a full 6×6 Strands grid solves in 40–60 ms — fast enough for live solve-as-you-type, with no noticeable lag on any phone we've tested.

What Is Strands?

Strands is a daily word puzzle published by The New York Times, launched in March 2024. Each day gives you a grid of letters (typically 6×6) and a single-word theme clue. Your job is to find a set of hidden theme words by tracing adjacent letters — up, down, left, right, and diagonally — without reusing a cell within one word.

One of the theme words is the spangram: a word whose highlighted path connects two opposite sides of the board. Finding it is usually the key to unlocking the rest of the puzzle. The remaining theme words are ordinary dictionary words that follow the same adjacency rules, which is exactly why a Strands word puzzle solver can help: every official answer is guaranteed to be in the word list it searches.

Unlike Wordle or Connections — where you pick letters or sort words by category — Strands is spatial. The challenge isn't guessing; it's seeing. Words can snake backward, diagonal, and overlap, so the human eye misses valid words that are right on the board. That blind-spot is what this Strands solver is built for.

If you're stuck, this solver shows every dictionary word your grid can produce — which makes the hidden theme words pop right out. It's also a great way to check whether the word you traced is valid before submitting it in the app.

Why this solver exists

Most existing Strands solvers are slow, full of ads, or hard to use on a phone. We built this one to be fast (solves a 6×6 grid in under 100ms in your browser), private (your grid never leaves your device), and pleasant to use — including the "exclude found words" feature that other solvers skip. It is, in short, a free Strands solver that respects your time and your privacy.

Why a Strands Solver Helps

Strands rewards vocabulary and pattern recognition, but even strong players hit a wall when a theme word is hiding in a diagonal you've already scanned twice. A Strands word finder removes that frustration in three concrete ways.

See every word the grid can make

Because the solver exhaustively walks every path against a large dictionary, nothing is missed. The five theme words and the spangram are ordinary dictionary words, so they always appear in the results — you just have to spot them among the candidates, which is far easier than spotting them on the board.

Exclude what you've already found

As you clear words in the NYT app, hide them here with one tap. The remaining list shrinks toward exactly what you still need — a focused view that paper-and-pencil solving can't give you.

Check before you submit

Typed a word, but not sure it's legal? Verify it in seconds. If it's in the dictionary and traceable on your grid, the Strands solver will show it — so you never waste a guess on an invalid word.

For a deeper walkthrough of rules, scoring, and strategy, see How to Play Strands, or jump straight to today's Strands answers and today's Strands hints.

Strands Solver FAQ