Today's Strands hints and answers for Sunday 26th May

Get your Sunday off to a good start by solving the Strands answers for today, 26th 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
• Strands answers for 26th May
• What to play after Strands

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 'Beyond Nashville' refers to the last name of American country singers.
• The Spangram starts on the first line, ends on the last line, and is 12 letters long.
• In total, there are two four-letter, three five-letter, one six-letter, and one seven-letter theme word to find.
• The six-letter word begins with 'B' and this singer-songwriter is the only artist in music history to have released nine albums that were certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America.
• The seven-letter word begins with 'P' and is also the name of a design pattern.

Strands answers for 26th May

Here's the Strands answers for today:

• CASH
• HILL
• SWIFT
• TWAIN
• URBAN
• BROOKS
• PAISLEY

Today's Strands Spangram is 'COUNTRY STARS'.

My first correct answer was 'CASH', so I thankfully caught on to the correct theme of today's Strands early, which made it a lot easier to solve. Hopefully the clues above helped you get today's Strands answers too.

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!