Ugh, Tuesday again! But hey at least we have got a fresh Strands puzzle to tackle. Today’s #548 totally caught me off guard at first – I was staring at “Things are starting to take shape” thinking it was about, I don’t know maybe cooking or construction projects?
Turns out I was way off. This one’s bringing back some serious high school flashbacks.
Quick Strands Refresher
If yo are a new here (welcome!), Strands is that addictive word hunt game from the New York Times where you find themed words in a letter grid. There’s always one special word called the spangram that stretches across the whole grid and basically gives away the theme if you can spot it.
You can play at nytimes.com/games/strands – fair warning, it’s pretty addictive once you get into it.
So What’s This “Things Taking Shape” About?
Okay, so I spent way too long thinking this was about literal things forming or projects coming together. But then I found the spangram and it all clicked – we’re talking about ACTUAL shapes here. Like, the mathematical kind.
The theme is basically a clever pun. Things taking shape = geometric shapes. Pretty sneaky, NYT!
Need Some Hints First?
Look, I get it. Sometimes you want to figure it out yourself but need just a tiny push in the right direction. Here’s what I can tell you without spoiling everything:
We’re dealing with a school subject here. Specifically, the one where you spent hours calculating angles and probably complained “when will I ever use this in real life?”
The words you are hunting for are super basic terms from this subject – stuff like the most fundamental concepts and measurements. Nothing too fancy or advanced.
And that spangram? It’s literally the name of the class where you’d learn all this stuff.
Still Stuck? Here’s More
The subject is geometry, obviously. You are looking for the building blocks – the most basic elements you’d learn about in any intro class.
Think about what makes up shapes: the simplest mark you can make, how you measure space inside something, where lines meet, that kind of stuff.
Some words are really simple (like the tiniest point in space) others are more about calculations and measurements.
The Spangram: GEOMETRY CLASS
Yeah, it’s GEOMETRY CLASS. Once I found this stretching across the grid everything made sense. “Things taking shape” = the class where you literally study shapes. Kind of brilliant, actually.
Here Are All the Words
- POINT – Remember learning this is just a location with no size?
- LINE – Goes on forever in both directions (theoretically)
- PLANE – Just a fancy word for a flat surface
- ANGLE – Where two lines meet and form corners
- CIRCLE – The perfect round shape we all tried to draw freehand
- AREA – How much space is inside a 2D shape
- VOLUME – Same thing but for 3D objects
Why These Words Work
Honestly, this is a pretty solid word list. They picked the real basics – stuff that anyone who made it through middle school math would recognize but not so obvious that you’d spot them immediately.
POINT and LINE are probably the first things any geometry teacher explains. PLANE sounds fancier but it’s just talking about flat surfaces. ANGLE is everywhere once you start looking for it.
CIRCLE is the shape everyone knows, and AREA and VOLUME are where geometry actually gets useful for real-world stuff like figuring out how much paint you need.
My Solving Strategy
I always hunt for the spangram first. Today it took me a while because I kept looking for theme-related words instead of the actual theme word itself.
Once I spotted GEOMETRY CLASS running across the grid, I started thinking about basic geometry terms and found most of the others pretty quickly. PLANE was probably the trickiest since it’s not a word you use much outside of math class.
Other Puzzles to Try Today
If you are on a puzzle streak definitely check out yesterday’s Strands 547 if you missed it.
Today’s Phrazle has some good phrases if you’re into idiom puzzles.
Connections 814 is always fun for finding patterns.
And Quordle if you want four Wordles at once (because apparently we’re all gluttons for punishment).
Lets Wrap Up
This was a clever theme – the pun worked really well and the word selection felt just right. Not too easy, not impossibly hard. Though I will admit finding GEOMETRY CLASS made me briefly nostalgic for high school math… which is weird because I definitely complained about it constantly back then.
Tomorrow’s puzzle will probably be completely different, so I’ll be back with more hints and solutions. Hope this helped you crack today’s grid!
