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NYT Strands hints, answers for March 31, 2026

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A game being played on a smartphone.

Today's NYT Strands hints are easy if you believe in magic.

Strands, the New York Times' elevated word-search game, requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky shapes and patterns. Every single letter in the grid will be part of an answer. There's always a theme linking every solution, along with the "spangram," a special, word or phrase that sums up that day's theme, and spans the entire grid horizontally or vertically.

By providing an opaque hint and not providing the word list, Strands creates a brain-teasing game that takes a little longer to play than its other games, like Wordle and Connections.

If you're feeling stuck or just don't have 10 or more minutes to figure out today's puzzle, we've got all the NYT Strands hints for today's puzzle you need to progress at your preferred pace.

NYT Strands hint for today’s theme: While you were sleeping…

The words are related to a mythical creature.

Today’s NYT Strands theme plainly explained

These words describe a children's tradition.

NYT Strands spangram hint: Is it vertical or horizontal?

Today's NYT Strands spangram is horizontal.

NYT Strands spangram answer today

Today's spangram is Tooth Fairy.

NYT Strands word list for March 31

  • Wings

  • Exchange

  • Tutu

  • Wand

  • Coin

  • Note

  • Pillow

  • Tooth Fairy

Looking for other daily online games? Mashable's Games page has more hints, and if you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now!

Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Strands.

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The best smartwatch youve never heard of is on sale for less than $50

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Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro in light green with blue and green abstract background

SAVE $54: As of April 3, the Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro is on sale at Woot! (an Amazon company) for only $44.99. That's $54.01 or 55% off its list price of $99 and the cheapest we've ever seen it.



CMF Watch 3 Pro in light green

Credit: Nothing

$44.99
at Woot

$99
Save $54.01

In a world of expensive Apple watches, the CMF Watch 3 Pro is a delightfully affordable and surprisingly fantastic alternative. It was one of Mashable's favorite smartwatches of 2025 and earned a near-perfect rating in our testing. It's an excellent value at full price (just $99), but on sale for under $50, it's an absolute steal.

As of April 3, you can grab the Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro at Woot! (an Amazon company) for only $44.99 instead of $99. That's 55% in savings and its best price ever. Just last week, we saw the smartwatch drop to $69 in Amazon's Big Spring Sale. This beats that sale price by an extra $24. The only catch? You'll have to go with the light green colorway. Though, honestly, I think that's the best choice anyway.

Mashable Contributor Lauren Allain tested the watch last fall and still wears it every day. She writes that it "looks, feels, and functions like a smartwatch that costs hundreds more." It offers loads of features like stress tracking, blood oxygen monitoring, precise heart-rate monitoring, dual-band GPS tracing, and in-depth sleep tracking, but where it truly outshines the competition is in battery power. As Allain puts it, "it just would not die." She had to turn on extra features to wear this thing down; it finally died after 16 days. That blows Apple's single day of battery life out of the water.

If you're in the market for a new smartwatch, fitness tracker, or sleep tracker, the CMF Watch 3 Pro does all three beautifully — and for less than $50 if you act fast.

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Age-verification is hurting sex educators and sex workers, studies suggest

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pixelated image of two men embracing with age gate in front of it

Experts have warned about how age verification laws will impact people's work and bank accounts — and now preliminary research suggests that they're right.

Age verification laws vary by state and country, but usually require submitting proof of age, be it a facial scan or uploading a government ID, to view potentially adult content. Since 2022, these laws have been enacted in different U.S. states. Other countries, such as the UK, have also instituted age verification via the Online Safety Act.

Sexual freedom nonprofit, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, found that around one in five sex educators (18 percent) say these laws have already impacted their work. For sex educators working in states with age verification mandates, one in three (33 percent) report this.

Approximately 60 respondents completed the survey last month, so this isn't a wide sample, but it hints at the trickle-down effects of age verification.

"Age-verification laws are already impacting sex education in the U.S.," says Woodhull president and CEO, Ricci Joy Levy, in a press release.

The majority of sex educators surveyed, 73 percent, are concerned that these laws will impact their work, while 76 percent fear they could be used to restrict access to sex education and related resources. As it is, only 37 percent of U.S. states require school sex education to be medically accurate, according to Boston University.

"Again and again, we were told this was only about keeping minors from accessing porn," Levy's statement continues. "Woodhull warned these vague and overly broad policies would also result in censorship of vital, non-explicit information about sex and gender, and the data bear this out. The current age-verification protocols are ripe for abuse, and educators are right to be scared."

Separate research from adult industry research firm SWR Data hints at a similar story when it comes to adult creators. Nearly half (45.2 percent) of the 500 surveyed last fall reported that their income from adult work decreased in the past year, with two-thirds (63 percent) saying it got harder to earn money in the past year as well.

There are several possible reasons for this trend, including overall socioeconomic uncertainty, but a staggering 98 percent of creators who reported lower income said they've experienced difficulties related to the "War on Porn."

The so-called War on Porn can refer to age verification as well as other attempts to remove adult content from the internet. Project 2025, the blueprint for President Trump's second term, calls for an outright ban on pornography and imprisoning its creators. In 2024, one of the co-writers of Project 2025, Russell Vought (now the director of the Office of Management and Budget), reportedly called age verification the "back door" to a porn ban.

The majority of surveyed adult creators who lost income also reported increased social media censorship and increased restrictions on what they can sell, and even fans are having trouble accessing their content.

The latter point — trouble with access — especially affected adult creators in U.S. and UK markets, according to SWR Data. They're also dealing with piracy, showing that viewers are finding ways to work around age verification.

Two separate studies last year suggested that age verification laws don't work to keep children off of porn sites. Reasons include VPN usage and going to non-compliant websites. But it appears that age-verification is working to hurt sex workers and sex educators.

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Reddit r/all takes another step into the grave

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Reddit logo on phone screen

Reddit has finally (mostly) killed r/all.

The internet's home page confirmed in a site update changelog that all links to the r/all feed now redirect to the main Reddit home feed.

"As part of ongoing efforts to simplify Reddit and improve Home feed personalization, the final steps to deprecate r/all are being implemented. All links to r/all will now redirect to the Home feed, following the prior removal of r/all entry points. Trending content remains available via r/popular," the changelog reads.

For those who don't know, for years, r/all has been a way for users to see a "less filtered" list of the most popular posts on the site than the r/popular feed, per Reddit itself. On r/all, sexually explicit posts would be filtered out, but other NSFW content would make it in, and users had the ability to filter out communities they didn't want to see from the feed.

In order to simplify things, Reddit decided to end r/all and have users focus on their home feeds instead, which is personalized for each user. This algorithm-based, curated feed will be the new homepage for the homepage of the internet.

This may end up being a sore spot for longtime Redditors, but there is good news for holdouts: r/all continues to exist on Old Reddit, the officially supported old-school version of the site that works like it did prior to all the big recent redesigns.

On ye olde Reddit, you can still experience r/all as you always did. Reddit hasn't taken that away…yet.

Of course, that doesn't help users of the mobile app, so maybe r/all will have to be a home-computer-only experience.

This is a big sea change for Reddit, but it's not entirely a surprise if you've been following the news. Reddit announced its intentions to deprecate r/all back in December. The only strange thing is that, last year, Reddit's CEO also said r/popular would be going away, per The Verge. Something must have changed, though, as r/popular remains while r/all is mostly dead.

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