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The November 18, 2025, NYT Strands puzzle was game #625, with the theme “All mixed up.” Start with the hints below and stop before the spoiler section if you want to solve it yourself.
Hints for November 18, 2025
These clues move from the least revealing to the full spangram answer. The hint-unlocking words are included for players who want to use Strands’ in-game help.
- Theme: “All mixed up.”
- Words that unlock in-game hints: DRAB, BLAME, COOL, CHAT, HATE, and DRIES.
- Spangram length: 10 letters.
- Spangram path: It begins at the left edge in row 6 and ends at the right edge in row 4.
How Strands hints work
Strands is a word-search-style game: players trace theme-related words through vertically, horizontally, or diagonally adjacent letters in a letter matrix. The spangram connects two opposite sides of the board and helps reveal the theme. Three valid guesses that are not among the puzzle’s solutions unlock a hint that highlights a theme word, according to a 2026 paper in the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms: the paper’s description of Strands.
Spoilers: all answers and the spangram
Stop here if you have not finished the puzzle. The theme words for game #625 are:
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- SCRAMBLED
- JUMBLED
- CHAOTIC
- SHUFFLED
- MUDDLED
Spangram: OUTOFORDER
TechRadar’s dated guide and a separate date-indexed archive agree on the theme, five words, and spangram: TechRadar’s November 18, 2025, answer guide and Strands Solution’s November 18 archive. TechRadar’s contributor rated this puzzle “Hard”; that is a subjective impression, not a measured difficulty score.
Quick Recap
Rank #4
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