Each day, the New York Times Strands puzzle offers a small meditation disguised as a word search — and Tuesday's entry, numbered 877, asks solvers to contemplate completeness itself. The theme, 'Leave nothing out,' gathers six synonyms for totality — WHOLE, COMPLETE, ENTIRE, FULL, TOTAL, UNDIVIDED — and hides them across a grid that rewards patience over speed. There is a quiet irony in the design: a puzzle about holding nothing back that withholds its answers until you've earned them, letter by letter.
NYT Strands #877 Hints and Answers: 'Leave Nothing Out'
Long words are harder to spot when they're broken into pieces
Mark
Why does a puzzle about completeness feel harder than one with a more specific theme?
Mimi
Because the theme is almost too broad. Once you know you're looking for words meaning "whole" or "complete," you start seeing them everywhere—FULL, ENTIRE, TOTAL—but you also see words that almost fit, that seem like they should fit. Your brain gets confused about what counts.
Mark
So the puzzle is using the theme against you?
Mimi
Exactly. A theme about "animals" or "things you find in a kitchen" narrows the field. But "leave nothing out"? That could describe almost any thorough action. The puzzle leans into that ambiguity.
Mark
What about those hint words—PELT, STEP, DILL? How do those help?
Mimi
They're just anchors. They're not theme words themselves. But finding them proves you can spot words on the grid, and once you've found three, the game rewards you by showing you one of the actual answers. It's a way of saying: keep looking, you're doing fine, here's proof.
Mark
Is there a strategy to finding the spangram?
Mimi
Not really, beyond patience. It's a theme word that happens to stretch all the way across. You find it the same way you find everything else—by looking at letter combinations and seeing what words emerge. The only difference is it's longer and it touches both edges.
Mark
Why would someone play this if it's frustrating?
Mimi
Because the moment you find one of those long words, the satisfaction is real. You've untangled something that looked like noise. And once you get a few answers, the grid starts making sense. The frustration is part of the appeal.
The Pulse
- The theme sounds simple — find words meaning 'complete' — but the grid turns familiarity into a trap, hiding long, obvious words in plain and disorienting sight.
- Six synonyms for totality must be located, plus a spangram that spans the entire board, ensuring not a single letter goes unused — the puzzle demands its own completeness.
- Solvers who stall early have a lifeline: find any three four-letter words — PELT, STEP, PETS, HOLE, COMP, and others work — and the game will unlock a theme answer as a reward.
- The puzzle lands not as a test of vocabulary but of spatial patience — understanding what you're looking for is easy; seeing it arranged across a grid is the real work.
Each day, the New York Times Strands puzzle offers a small meditation disguised as a word search — and Tuesday's entry, numbered 877, asks solvers to contemplate completeness itself. The theme, 'Leave nothing out,' gathers six synonyms for totality — WHOLE, COMPLETE, ENTIRE, FULL, TOTAL, UNDIVIDED — and hides them across a grid that rewards patience over speed. There is a quiet irony in the design: a puzzle about holding nothing back that withholds its answers until you've earned them, letter by letter.
Tuesday's NYT Strands puzzle, number 877, arrives with a theme that sounds almost too easy: 'Leave nothing out,' or equivalently, don't do anything halfway. The six answers — WHOLE, COMPLETE, ENTIRE, FULL, TOTAL, and UNDIVIDED — are all synonyms for the same idea, totality with nothing missing. The concept is immediately clear. The execution is where the difficulty lives.
Long words are harder to trace across a grid than short ones, and when a theme is broad enough to feel like it could swallow half the dictionary, solvers can second-guess themselves even when they're close. The puzzle designer leans into that uncertainty.
For those who get stuck, the game offers a structured way forward: find any three words of four letters or more, and Strands will reveal one of the theme answers outright. Suggested starting points include PELT, STEP, PETS, DILL, SALE, HOLE, COMP, TIRE, and HERE — small footholds that give the puzzle permission to open up.
Waiting at the far edge is the spangram, a word that stretches from one side of the grid to the other and ties the theme together. It's also the mechanism that ensures every letter on the board gets used — the puzzle's own way of leaving nothing out. Solving it completely is the point, and the finish line.
Tuesday's New York Times Strands puzzle arrives with a straightforward theme wrapped in genuine difficulty. The challenge, numbered 877, asks solvers to think about completeness—to leave nothing out, or put another way, to refuse doing anything halfway. It sounds simple enough until you start hunting for words on the grid.
The puzzle's six theme answers all circle the same idea from different angles. WHOLE, COMPLETE, ENTIRE, FULL, TOTAL, and UNDIVIDED are synonyms for totality, each one a different way of saying the same thing: nothing missing, nothing held back. The real test isn't understanding the theme—it's finding these words among the letters, especially since some of them are long and their letter arrangements don't always sit neatly in your mind.
If you're stuck early, the game itself offers a built-in ladder. Find any three words of four letters or longer, and Strands will reveal one of the theme answers for you. The puzzle designer used PELT, STEP, PETS, DILL, SALE, HOLE, COMP, TIRE, and HERE to unlock those hints, though any valid four-letter word will do the job. The strategy here is permission to wander: you don't need to see the big picture immediately. Just find whatever words you can spot, and the puzzle will guide you toward the answers that matter.
Beyond those six theme words sits the spangram—a word that stretches from one edge of the grid to the other, also tied to the theme. Finding it requires the same patience as finding everything else, but it's the final piece that ensures every single letter on the board gets used. That's the real finish line: not just solving the puzzle, but using it completely, leaving nothing behind.
The difficulty here isn't in the concept. It's in the execution. Long words are harder to spot when they're broken into pieces across a grid. And when the theme itself is about completeness, the puzzle designer has room to hide answers in plain sight—because so many words could theoretically fit a theme about doing things fully. That's what makes today's puzzle tricky, even if you understand exactly what you're looking for.
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