Today's Strands hints and answers for Friday 17th May

Want to kick your brain into gear this Friday? Then we can help with the Strands answers for today, 17th May.

If you're new to Strands, your goal with this particular New York Times daily puzzle is to find all of the theme words and a 'Spangram' in a wordsearch-like grid. All of the regular words relate to this Spangram, which is a word, or phrase, that you also have to find within the wordsearch.

To help you narrow down the theme and guess the related words, there is a theme sentence provided. With this clue, you then have to find all of the correct words that relate to it. The only catch is that your letters must be beside each other, so it's easier to find words than in a regular wordsearch, as you can switch to any direction, but this also makes it more difficult to find the exact theme words, as there are so many options.

Thankfully, there is a hint system. For every word you submit that isn't a theme word or Spangram, you make progress towards unlocking a hint. Once you unlock one, you can then press the hint button and the outline of a correct theme word will be highlighted.

It's also important to note that Strands is currently in its beta stage, so some of these rules might change in the future upon its full release.

On this page:

Hints for today's Strands answer

Instead of going straight to the answers, you might only need a few clues to help you get all theme words and the Spangram, so here's some hints for today's Strands:

• Today's theme hint 'Looking for a mate' refers to items that come in pairs.
• The Spangram starts on the fourth line, ends on the third line, and is six letters long.
• In total, there are two four-letter, one five-letter, one six-letter, two seven-letter, and one nine-letter theme word to find.
• The five-letter word starts with 'P' and is a tool that can be used for bending wire, pulling, or cutting small things.
• One of seven-letter words starts with 'E' and is used to reduce the noise around you.

Strands answers for 17th May

Here's the Strands answers for today:

• WING
• TONG
• PLIER
• MITTEN
• BOOKEND
• EARPLUG
• CHOPSTICK

Today's Strands Spangram is 'PAIRED'.

Yet another Strands that's basically just a long wordsearch, as there are just so many possibilities out there that stop this from being a quick search even when you know the theme! Hopefully the clues above helped you solve today's Strands a little quicker though.

What to play after Strands

You might have heard of this game called Wordle? It's pretty good, we think it might stick around. If you've already solved that today, however, The New York Times does offer other games. When it comes to word-based games, there's Connections, the Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, and Letter Boxed. If you fancy a break from words, then you can also try Tiles, a motif matching game, or Sudoku.

Maybe you just want to keep playing Strands instead of making it a daily puzzle? In that case Strands Unlimited is the puzzle for you. There's a few differences to the rules, but it's basically just an almost never-ending stream of Strands puzzles to solve.

If you're after something similar to Connections, however, then those in the UK might want to boot up the BBC iPlayer and play along with Only Connect, which came out many years before the daily NYT Connections puzzle, something host Victoria Coren Mitchell was quick to point out.

Puzzgrid is another Connections-style puzzle that's closer to the BBC show than NYT's version, as you only have three minutes to solve them.

There's also Semantle, a game puzzle where you have to reach the secret word by guessing its meaning. Spelling doesn't count in Semantle, as you have to pay attention to the numerical value your guesses have instead, to chart your path to the answer.

Lastly, if you're interesting in how the NYTimes puzzles get made, we've got an interview with Jonathan Knight, Head of Games for The NYTimes

Good luck solving today's Strands!