NYT Strands hints, answers for January 3, 2026
Mashable••entertainment
Key Points:
- The New York Times' Strands game is an advanced word search where words can change direction and every letter in the grid is used, with a theme linking all solutions and a special "spangram" word or phrase spanning the grid.
- Today's Strands theme centers on "newness," with words describing originality, and the spangram phrase is "Break New Ground," which appears vertically.
- The word list for January 3 includes Inventive, Seminal, Break New Ground, Original, Novel, and Fresh, all related to the theme of originality.
- Strands offers a more challenging and time-consuming puzzle compared to other NYT games like Wordle and Connections, as it provides only an opaque hint without a word list.
