If you landed here chasing NYT Strands hints and answers today, congratulations, you picked the one day this month where the puzzle stops being cryptic and just tells you what it wants. Puzzle number 936, live for Friday, September 25, 2026, swaps the usual riddles and red herrings for something that feels suspiciously like a flashback to primary school math class. The theme is numbers, specifically the kind you get by multiplying a number by itself, and the grid is refreshingly upfront about it.
For anyone chasing NYT word game hints today after wandering in from a Wordle streak or a Connections rabbit hole, Strands is the New York Times’ spatial word search. Players get a six-by-eight letter grid and hunt for words tied to a hidden theme, tracing them in straight lines that can bend around corners mid-word. One answer, the spangram, always touches two opposite sides of the board and sums up what everything else has in common. Find three unrelated words along the way and the game hands out a free hint, which today’s solvers will barely need.
In This Article
What Today’s NYT Strands Theme Is Really About
Today’s NYT Strands theme, explained honestly, nudges players toward numbers, and the plain version of that hint is simply “these are squares.” Every non-spangram answer in the grid is a number written out in words, and every one of those numbers happens to be a perfect square, meaning it is what you get when you multiply a whole number by itself. It is the rare Strands theme that rewards times tables more than vocabulary, and this NYT Strands square numbers puzzle is proof the format can flex into math without losing its personality.
Read Also: NYT Wordle #1924 Hints and Answer, The Solution for September 25, 2026
Hints for the September 25 Strands Puzzle
Before the full answer list, here is today’s NYT Strands spangram answer teased out gently, along with a few nudges for anyone chasing an honest solve rather than a scroll straight to the bottom.
- The spangram is thirteen letters long, runs horizontally across the board, and names the entire category in two words.
- Every theme word is a number spelled out in full, not written as digits.
- The smallest answer is a single digit multiplied by itself. The largest is nearly triple digits.
- None of today’s answers are the squares most people memorize first, like sixteen or sixty four. The puzzle skips the obvious ones on purpose.
Today’s NYT Strands Answers
Here is the complete solve for puzzle 936, the full NYT Strands answers September 25 list in one place.
- FOUR
- NINE
- TWENTY FIVE
- THIRTY SIX
- EIGHTY ONE
- Spangram: SQUARE NUMBERS
Six answers in total, and the pattern is tidy once it lands. Four is two times two, nine is three times three, twenty-five is five times five, thirty-six is six times six, and eighty-one is nine times nine. The puzzle quietly skips over one, sixteen, forty-nine, sixty-four, sixty-four, and one hundred, all of which would have given the theme away within seconds. Leaving those out is a small bit of craft that keeps the solve honest for longer than it has any right to.
A Little Extra Context
Square numbers get their name from geometry rather than arithmetic. The ancient Greeks noticed that if you arrange a square number of dots or tiles, they always form an actual square, with equal rows and columns and nothing left over. Nine tiles make a tidy three by three block, twenty five makes a five by five block, and so on. That is also why a square number is sometimes called a “perfect square,” a phrase math teachers have been writing on whiteboards since long before Strands existed. There is even a neat shortcut for spotting one. No perfect square ever ends in two, three, seven or eight, which is a fun party trick if your party happens to be a math competition.
Puzzles built around pure arithmetic are rare for Strands, which usually leans on pop culture, idioms or objects that share a category. This grid lands only a few days after last Sunday’s grandiosity themed puzzle had solvers reaching for synonyms of bragging, and not long after the pirate slang grid that showed up for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Between costumes, confidence and now times tables, the puzzle’s writers have covered a strange amount of ground this month.
How to Play NYT Strands
New to the game? The rules stay simple even when the theme does not. Connect letters horizontally, vertically or diagonally to spell out theme words, using each tile only once. Finding enough non-theme words unlocks a free hint. Find the spangram, which lights up once solved, and the rest of the board tends to open up fast.
