Spangram Spotlight: The puzzle is built around THREELITTLEPIGS, a sweeping spangram that weaves across the board, setting the narrative tone.
Theme Exploration: Solvers are guided toward memorable elements of the story, including STRAW, STICKS, BRICKS, as well as action-driven words like HUFF, PUFF, BLOW, and DOWN.
Solving Experience: Blending storytelling with word-search mechanics, today’s Strands feels intuitive yet rewarding, offering steady clues without sacrificing challenge.
The NYT Strands is back again, and this time it presents a brand-new word-search challenge that will test your pattern recognition, vocabulary, and lateral-thinking skills. Today’s puzzle asks players to reveal a central spangram and, at the same time, find the themed words hidden in the grid.
Strands is a game that, through clever misdirection and overlapping paths, rewards patience and observation, making it a daily brain teaser that is great for both casual solvers and word-game enthusiasts, as it is a satisfying challenge.
The New York Times' word search for new users is called Strands. Every day's problem focuses on the spangram strand that runs the concept through the grid.
Learn words by following the letters, and as recognition becomes resolution. It requires less force and more attention to detail, patience, memory, and the pure delight of putting things in place.
Also Read: NYT Strands December 20, 2025 Puzzle: Spangram, Theme Words Explained
The NYT Strands are such a fun and interesting way to challenge your mind daily with their captivating Spangrams. The answer for the Spangram of the day for the Strands on December 21, 2025, is THREELITTLEPIGS.
Theme Words
Here is what the theme is about. The whole idea of the puzzle is to discover all the answers, including the spangram, a theme word that runs through the entire puzzle in a mix of horizontal and vertical clues.
Nonspangram answers are as follows:
HUFF, PUFF, BRICKS, STICKS, BLOW, DOWN, STRAW.
Today's New York Times Strands puzzle takes a playful turn, transforming The Three Little Pigs into a word-search challenge.
The spangram, THREELITTLEPIGS, unfolds over the grid and supports solvers to find the theme words related to the story's famous events.
The puzzle consists of words for materials such as STRAW, STICKS, and BRICKS, and actions like HUFF, PUFF, BLOW, and DOWN; it not only demands pattern recognition but also storytelling intuition.