Strands Today #900 Hints and Spangram

NYT Strands today, Thursday, August 20, 2026: the spangram for puzzle #900 is YOURETHE, and the theme is “Split superlatives”. Eight theme words sit beneath it, and they pair off into four compliments.

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

NYT Strands Hints Today, August 20, 2026 (Puzzle #900)

Every answer is half of a phrase. None of them means anything on its own.
The spangram is not a word. It is the opening the other eight all share.
Two of the answers are insects and animals in disguise, and both are hiding a possessive.
The two longest words on the board are the only ones that give the theme away.
Every phrase is a way of telling somebody they are the finest example of something.

What Is Today’s Strands Spangram? NYT Strands #900 for August 20

The spangram for Strands #900 is YOURETHE, which is “you’re the” with the space taken out.

Today’s NYT Strands Answers

BEES
KNEES
CATS
PAJAMAS
GOLD
STANDARD
VERY
BEST
YOURETHE (spangram)

Read in pairs, they are the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the gold standard and the very best.

Why Strands #900 Plays Harder Than a Medium Rating Suggests

The usual way into a Strands board is to find the longest, strangest word and let the theme fall out of it. That barely works here. Five of the eight answers are BEES, BEST, CATS, GOLD and VERY, and there is nothing about any of them that says “theme word”. They are among the most ordinary short words in English, and on a grid full of letters they look like the filler that Strands boards usually contain.

This board contains no filler at all. The nine answers use 48 letters between them, which is exactly a six by eight grid. Every cell belongs to a theme word, so eliminating letters gains you nothing.

The apostrophes are the real trick. Two of the four phrases are possessive, the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas, but Strands has no punctuation. BEES and CATS therefore sit on the board as ordinary plurals, and the grammatical signal that would have paired them with KNEES and PAJAMAS has been stripped out. A solver who finds BEES early has no reason to think it is waiting for a partner.

PAJAMAS and STANDARD are the two entries that carry the board, being long enough to be unmistakable once seen. STANDARD is also the likeliest place to stall, because it reads as a benchmark, a norm, or a flag long before it reads as the back half of a compliment.

The spangram is the last inversion. It usually names the theme. This one completes it, which means it tells you nothing until you already have a pair.