Strands Today #898 Hints and Spangram

NYT Strands today, Tuesday, August 18, 2026: the spangram for puzzle #898 is CHARLATAN, and the theme is “Fool me once …”. Six theme words sit alongside it, and every one of them is a verb.

If you would rather solve it yourself, the Strands hints come first and the answers follow further down.

NYT Strands Hints Today, August 18, 2026 (Puzzle #898)

The theme is about being tricked, and the board is not being subtle about it.
All six theme words are things one person does to another. The spangram is the person who does them.
Two of the answers are only four letters long, which makes them the easiest to walk straight past.
Two others are the kind of playful compound word that sounds older than it is.
The spangram is nine letters and names a fraud who pretends to expertise they do not have.

What Is Today’s Strands Spangram? NYT Strands #898 for August 18

The spangram for Strands #898 is CHARLATAN.

Today’s NYT Strands Answers

BAMBOOZLE
BILK
DECEIVE
DUPE
HOODWINK
MISLEAD
CHARLATAN (spangram)

Why Strands #898 Plays Harder Than Its Theme Suggests

The theme gives itself up immediately. Anyone reading “Fool me once …” knows within a second that they are hunting synonyms for deception, and that is usually where a Strands board becomes easy. This one does not, and the reason is grammar.

Every theme word is a verb. BAMBOOZLE, BILK, DECEIVE, DUPE, HOODWINK and MISLEAD are all things you do to somebody. The spangram is a noun. So a solver scanning the grid with a mental list of deception verbs is looking for exactly the wrong part of speech when it comes to the one word that has to touch both edges of the board. You can have five theme words cleared and still be circling CHARLATAN, because it does not belong to the set you have been searching for.

The second problem is length. BILK and DUPE are four letters each, the shortest a Strands answer can reasonably be, and short words disappear inside longer ones on a crowded grid. Both are also the least used words in the set in ordinary speech, so they do not surface easily from memory either. Expect them to be the last two found.

Register is doing quiet work too. BAMBOOZLE and HOODWINK are playful, almost Victorian compounds. DECEIVE and MISLEAD are flat and neutral. BILK and DUPE are terse and slightly legalistic. A solver who fixes on one register and generates candidates from it will keep missing the others, which is why a board this thematically obvious still earns a medium rating.

One piece of structure worth knowing: the seven answers use 48 letters between them, which is exactly the size of a Strands grid at six columns by eight rows. Every cell on this board belongs to a theme word. There is no filler to eliminate, so an incorrect guess costs you nothing in information but also gains you nothing.

The practical advice is to hunt the spangram first rather than last. CHARLATAN is the most constrained word on the board because it has to reach both edges, and it is the only noun, so it is the one entry the theme is not helping you find by association.

Yesterday’s Strands Answer

Yesterday’s NYT Strands for August 17, 2026 was #897, themed “On a bender”, with the spangram BODYJOINTS and seven theme words including the silent-K pair KNEE and KNUCKLE.