NYT Strands today — hints, answers and spangram for Sunday, November 24 (game #266)

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my Wordle today, NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.

Your Strands expert

Your Strands expert

Marc McLaren

NYT Strands today (game #266) – hint #1 – today’s theme

NYT Strands today (game #266) – hint #2 – clue words

Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.

• ROUGE
• ROGUE
• CREW
• RIDE
• PIPER
• DIRE

NYT Strands today (game #266) – hint #3 – spangram

NYT Strands today (game #266) – hint #4 – spangram position

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.

NYT Strands today (game #266) – the answers

The answers to today’s Strands, game #266, are…

• DEVIL
• SPOON
• DIPPER
• WOMEN
• RASCALS
• FOOT
• LEAGUE
• ROCK
• SPANGRAM: LITTLE

• My rating: Hard
• My score: Perfect

Now, this is more like it! This is absolutely the hardest Strands puzzle we’ve had for weeks, in large part because the concept is much more abstract than some of the recent list-items-in-a-specific-category games.

Instead, this is akin to the ‘Blank word’ groups you regularly get in Connections, with all of these being words that can go after LITTLE: LEAGUE, RASCALS, ROCK, DEVIL, WOMEN and so on. The only ones I don’t understand are SPOON and FOOT, but I presume they have some relevance for others and that’s just a lack of general knowledge on my part shining through.

Anyway, I solved it in the end, but had to think about it for a while, and didn’t really get what the concept was until about halfway through;…