Each day, the New York Times Strands puzzle offers players not just a word game, but a small meditation on language and human nature. Today's puzzle, number 931, turns its lens on vanity — the ancient, universal impulse to be seen, admired, and envied. Seven words hide in the grid, each a different shade of self-promotion, inviting solvers to reflect on the very instinct they may be indulging by seeking the answers.
NYT Strands #931 Answers: Sept. 20 Puzzle Solutions
Every three words you find reveals one answer you're hunting for.
Mark
So this puzzle is about showing off. Are all seven answers basically synonyms, or do they each mean something different?
Mimi
They're in the same family, but they have different shades. BRAG and BOAST are pretty close—both are about talking yourself up. FLEX is more modern slang for the same thing. GLOAT is meaner; it's showing off specifically to make someone else feel bad. STRUT is physical—you're literally walking around proud. BLUSTER is about making noise and exaggeration. POSTURE is the most abstract; it's about the attitude you strike, not necessarily the words you say.
Luke
But the puzzle doesn't require you to know those distinctions to solve it, right? You just need to find the words on the grid.
Mimi
Correct. The theme helps you recognize them once you spot the letters, but the actual solving is mechanical—you're looking for letter combinations that spell real words.
Mark
And the spangram is the hard part because it has to reach all the way across?
Mimi
It has to reach from one edge to the other, yes. And it has to use letters that no other answer uses. So it's constrained in a way the other answers aren't.
Luke
How many letters are we talking about for a spangram? The source doesn't actually tell us what it is.
Mimi
Right—CNET published the answers but didn't include the spangram itself. You'd have to solve it yourself or look elsewhere.
Mark
Is there a strategy to finding it, or is it just trial and error?
Mimi
Once you've found most of the other answers, the remaining letters on the board are pretty limited. So you're looking at what's left and trying to make a phrase that fits the theme.
Luke
Which means if you're stuck on the spangram, you're probably missing one of the seven regular answers, and you don't realize it yet.
Mimi
That's often how it goes, yes.
The Pulse
- The puzzle's theme — 'Putting on airs' — demands solvers think like someone who can't resist the spotlight, hunting for words that capture every flavor of showing off.
- The twist that makes Strands genuinely tricky: players must first find unrelated four-letter words, and only after every three does the game reveal a single theme answer — still scrambled.
- Seven theme words are in play today — BRAG, FLEX, BOAST, GLOAT, STRUT, BLUSTER, and POSTURE — scattered across the board with no proximity to guide the eye.
- The spangram looms as the final test, a word or phrase that stretches edge to edge and ties the entire theme together, leaving no letter on the board unclaimed.
Each day, the New York Times Strands puzzle offers players not just a word game, but a small meditation on language and human nature. Today's puzzle, number 931, turns its lens on vanity — the ancient, universal impulse to be seen, admired, and envied. Seven words hide in the grid, each a different shade of self-promotion, inviting solvers to reflect on the very instinct they may be indulging by seeking the answers.
The New York Times Strands puzzle for September 20th, 2026 — number 931 — is built around a single human truth: vanity. Its theme, 'Putting on airs,' points solvers toward words for people who make spectacles of themselves, who need to be noticed. It's a theme old as language itself.
Strands doesn't work like a traditional word search. Players aren't handed a list to check off. Instead, they hunt freely for any valid word of four letters or more, and for every three found, the game rewards them by illuminating one theme answer — though that answer still arrives scrambled, leaving the real work to the solver.
Today's seven theme words — BRAG, FLEX, BOAST, GLOAT, STRUT, BLUSTER, and POSTURE — are spread across the full grid, each one a distinct shade of self-promotion. For those needing a foothold, words like TAUT, DISS, BURSE, SALT, and BRAT exist on the board and can be used to unlock hints without being theme answers themselves.
The puzzle's deepest challenge is the spangram: a single word or phrase that spans the board from edge to edge, using only letters unclaimed by any other answer. Finding it means holding the whole grid in mind at once. When it clicks, every last letter falls into place — and the puzzle, like all good vanity, finally reveals itself completely.
The New York Times Strands puzzle for September 20th, 2026—puzzle number 931—asks you to think about vanity. The theme is "Putting on airs," which is another way of saying show-off. If you're stuck, that's the direction to point yourself: words about people who make a spectacle of themselves, who want to be noticed, who can't help but draw attention to what they've got.
Strands works differently than a traditional word search. You're not given a list of words to hunt for. Instead, you hunt for any words you can find—they need to be at least four letters long—and the puzzle itself will start revealing the theme answers. Find three valid words, and the game highlights one of the answers you're looking for. The catch is that the revealed answer still needs to be unscrambled by you, which is where the real puzzle lives.
Today's theme words are scattered across the board, which means you can't rely on proximity to guide you. The seven answers that fit the theme are BRAG, FLEX, BOAST, GLOAT, STRUT, BLUSTER, and POSTURE. Each one is a different flavor of showing off—some are verbs, some are nouns, all of them describe someone drawing attention to themselves in a way that reads as excessive or self-centered.
If you're hunting for words to unlock hints, CNET suggests starting with TAUT, DISS, BURSE, SALT, BRAT, SATE, GATE, RATE, BOATS, STOP, and TOPS. None of these are theme answers, but they're all legitimate four-letter words (or longer) that exist on the board. Every three you find will trigger the game to reveal one more piece of the puzzle.
The real challenge today is the spangram—the word that stretches from one edge of the puzzle to the other and uses letters that haven't been claimed by any other answer. Finding it requires seeing the full board at once and recognizing a phrase that ties everything together thematically. Once you've found all the theme words and the spangram, every single letter on the board will be accounted for.
Strands varies in difficulty and structure from day to day. Some puzzles have eight theme answers; others have fewer. The number isn't fixed, which keeps the game from becoming predictable. Today's puzzle is one where the theme is clear enough—vanity, self-promotion, the impulse to show off—but the execution requires patience and a willingness to hunt through the grid methodically.
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