The NYT Strands answer today, for Sunday, August 23, 2026, solves puzzle #903 on the theme An epic journey. The spangram is THEODYSSEY.
The six theme words are SHIP, KING, SIRENS, CYCLOPS, SUITORS, and UNDERWORLD, all lifted from Homer’s poem.
NYT Strands Hints Today, August 23, 2026 (#903)
- The theme is a story roughly three thousand years old that most people met at school.
- Two of the theme words are ordinary four-letter nouns and look like filler until you know the theme.
- One theme word is exactly as long as the spangram. It is not the spangram.
- The spangram begins with a word most solvers never think to look for.
- Singers who are bad news, a one-eyed giant, and the men who would not leave.
NYT Strands Answer Today: Spangram and Theme Words for #903
Spangram: THEODYSSEY
Theme words: SHIP, KING, SIRENS, CYCLOPS, SUITORS, UNDERWORLD
The Board Has Two Ten-Letter Words
Strands runs on an eight-by-six grid, which is forty-eight letters, and every one of them belongs to a theme word or the spangram. Count today’s: THEODYSSEY is ten, UNDERWORLD is ten, CYCLOPS and SUITORS are seven each, SIRENS is six, SHIP and KING are four each. That is exactly forty-eight, so the list above is the whole board with nothing left over.
It also exposes the trap. UNDERWORLD is the same length as the spangram, and on most Strands boards the longest word you find is the spangram. Trace out ten letters, watch them not light up gold, and the natural conclusion is that you have the wrong word rather than the right word in the wrong role.
The spangram hides a second way. THE ODYSSEY is a title, and it carries its definite article. Strands spangrams are usually descriptive, something like MOUNTAINRANGE or BODYJOINTS, so a solver scanning for a phrase does not go hunting for a THE. Find those three letters early and the rest falls out quickly.
Why SHIP and KING Are the Hard Ones
SIRENS, CYCLOPS and SUITORS announce themselves. Nobody uses those words by accident, and once one of them lands, the theme is obvious.
SHIP and KING are the opposite problem. They are four ordinary letters each; they carry no mythological signal at all, and they are short enough to be easy to miss in a grid built around ten-letter runs. Solvers tend to leave them until the end and then spend longer on them than on CYCLOPS.
One practical warning. At the time of writing, at least one widely read Strands answers page was still serving yesterday’s puzzle on its evergreen today’s answers URL, complete with the Peak Americana theme and the MOUNTAINRANGE spangram from #902. If the answers you are checking do not match the board in front of you, that is the likeliest reason.
What we cannot tell you is how the field found it. The New York Times publishes no daily solve statistics for Strands, so any difficulty rating anywhere, ours included, is one writer’s read of the board.
Yesterday’s Strands answer was #902, where the spangram ran to thirteen letters and six American mountain ranges hid behind commoner meanings. Our Connections coverage runs alongside it every morning.
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