Today's Strands hints and answers for Tuesday 21st May

Strands is back again this Tuesday with a new theme and Spangram to solve, and we can help with the Strands answers for today, 21st 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 'At the bar' refers to common tabs and shortcuts you may find on a web browser or application.
• The Spangram starts on the first line, ends on the last line, and is nine letters long across two words.
• In total, there are three four-letter, one five-letter, one six-letter, one seven-letter, and one nine-letter theme word to find.
• The six letter word begins with 'W' and is what you look through to see outside buildings.
• The nine-letter word begins with 'F', and is is the American spelling for something you like over others of its kind.

Strands answers for 21st May

Here's the Strands answers for today:

• HELP
• FILE
• EDIT
• TOOLS
• WINDOW
• HISTORY
• FAVORITES

Today's Strands Spangram is 'MENU ITEMS'.

Yet another Strands that had me completely stumped on the correct theme, even when I got the Spangram. After getting 'FILE' I thought it might be something to do with practising law, then 'MENU' made me think it was things found in bar restaurants, and then I was just confused... Hopefully the clues above helped you solve today's Strands quicker than me!

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!