NYT Strands today — hints, spangram and answers for game #185 (Wednesday, September 4 2024)

1. Today's hints

2. Today's answer

3. Yesterday's answer

Need a bit of help with NYT Strands today? Today's puzzle theme — "American beauty" — is going to be really hard for anyone outside the United States.

Below, we've compiled some useful hints for Strands #185, as well as the answers, should it come to that. We'll start off with some clues, before building up to the full answer for Strands #185, so read on if you need a little help.

Warning: Spoilers lie ahead for Strands #185.

Today's NYT Strands answer — Today's theme and hints

The official theme for NYT Strands #185 is... "American beauty".

And here's an unofficial hint from me: "Stunning scenery."

If you're still in the dark, here are some useful words to give you those valuable clue tokens:

• TAILS
• RACER
• STAG
• LANE
• WORD
• SALAD
• BARD

Still struggling? The spangram will give you a hint about the connection word. Today, it starts with 'N' and ends in 'S'.

Scroll down to find out what it is...

It's NATIONALPARKS.

Today's Strands answers

So, what are today's Strands answers for game #185?

Drumroll, please...

• ARCHES
• REDWOOD
• BADLANDS
• GLACIER
• SAGUARO

..and the spangram was BELLTONES.

Strands #185

“American beauty”

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Hi Strands fans. This is a painful one for anyone outside of America - or maybe I'm just a bit ignorant. Either way, I really struggled, even when I knew exactly what the puzzle was about.

I had to use a clue for the first word: ARCHES. That meant nothing to me, but it did create enough space for the word "wood" to its left, which I extended into REDWOOD.

At this point, I had a hunch that I was dealing with something very America-centric. And when I saw the word "parks" in the middle of the grid, I figured it might be NATIONALPARKS, which did indeed turn out to be the spangram.

I had three left to find, and this led to a tedious process of trial and error while I tried to bruteforce possible words. BADLANDS? Is that a park? Yes it is. Two to go.

I saw GLACIER in the bottom right-hand corner, which turned out to be the penultimate number, and that just left the anagram of GASUAOR to decode. After a lot of random connections, I eventually got it right with SAGUARO.

Ugh. Hopefully tomorrow's will be more in my wheelhouse.

Yesterday's Strands answers

Reading this in a later time zone? You can find the full article on yesterday's Strands answers for game #184 right here .