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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Alan Martin

NYT Strands today — hints, spangram and answers for game #66 (Wednesday, May 8 2024)

NYT Strands on a cellphone.
Strands today: Quick menu

Need a bit of help with NYT Strands today? I'm not surprised. Today's puzzle — "Can you digit?", a delightful play on yesterday's "Can you dig it?" — has an obvious theme, but some very hard answers in the mix.

Below, we've compiled some useful hints for Strands #66, 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 #66, so read on if you need a little help.

Warning: Spoilers lie ahead for Strands #66.  

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

The official theme for NYT Strands #66 is... "Can you digit?".

And here's an unofficial hint from me: Beyond the calculator.

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

  • BAND
  • CLUE
  • BRIE
  • NARY
  • STEEP
  • BARE
  • DANE

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

Scroll down to find out what it is...

It's NUMBERS.

Today's Strands answers

So, what are today's Strands answers for game #66?

Drumroll, please...

  • TELEPHONE
  • WHOLE
  • LUCKY
  • BINARY
  • SERIAL
  • BACON
  • DANCE
(Image credit: Alan Martin)

...and the spangram was NUMBERS.

Clues used: 1.

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Hi Strands fans. Today's puzzle was pretty devious - and frankly a little silly by the end as the words are only tangientally linked. 

I got the theme right away, getting the spangram of NUMBERS spelled backwards from right to left. Then, after a short period of looking to spell out figures (e.g: "three", "fifteen", etc.) I spotted TELEPHONE in the top right.

"Okay, great," I thought - I'm on the right track. Only I wasn't, as I couldn't find anything related to social security numbers of birthdates. 

It was only when I found WHOLE and LUCKY in the bottom half of the board that I realized this was a very broad definition of numbers. BINARY neatly finished the bottom half of the board.

But then I was stumped - so stumped I had to use a clue which revealed one of the two remaining words was an anagram of CDENA. I couldn't decode that.

Fortunately, the remaining letters were an anagram of the word BACON which was surprisingly an answer. 

BACON? What? It turns out this is a reference to the Bacon Number - the concept from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game.

...yeah. As I said: a stretch.

Realizing how tenuous some of these could be, I returned to my CDENA problem and decoded it to DANCE. "Dance number" - geddit? Hmmmm.

Maybe I'm bitter because I found it quite tricky today, but all this felt a bit too tenuous to be enjoyable. Hopefully tomorrow's will be a return to form...

Yesterday's Strands answers

Reading this in a later time zone? You can find the full article on yesterday's Strands answers for game #65 right here.

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