Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:

ForbesNYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Monday, July 14

The New York Times’ Strands puzzle is a play on the classic word search. It’s in beta for now, which means it’ll only stick around if enough people play it every day.

There’s a new game of Strands to play every day. The game will present you with a six by eight grid of letters. The aim is to find a group of words that have something in common, and you’ll get a clue as to what that theme is. When you find a theme word, it will remain highlighted in blue.

You’ll also need to find a special word called a spangram. This tells you what the words have in common. The spangram links two opposite sides of the board. While the theme words will not be a proper name, the spangram can be a proper name. When you find the spangram, it will remain highlighted in yellow.

Be warned: You’ll need to be on your toes.

“Some themes are fill-in-the-blank phrases. They may also be steps in a process, items that all belong to the same category, synonyms or homophones,” The New York Times notes. “Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles within a week, [Wordle and Strands editor Tracy]

Bennett plans to throw Strands solvers curveballs every once in a while.”

Time to do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:

And mine is:

Now we begin the answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list of the other answers, the spangram is:

Here it is on the page, and read on:

The answers are:

I knew approximately what this was going to be based on that initial clue, but I wondered if it might be the circus to start with. County fairs are, however, more likely to be attended by the general public. I’ve been to plenty of fairs but I don’t live in the country so we do not have livestock at our fairs (you could actually get four clues out of that, live, lives, vest and stock, but it was the last thing I found).

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.