About TodayHint
TodayHint publishes daily hints, spangrams, and full answers for three New York Times puzzles — Strands, Connections, and Pips — built as a ladder you can stop at any rung: a nudge if that's all you want, the complete answer if you're stuck. This page explains what the site actually does, how the hints get written, what we promise about freshness, how to report something wrong, and exactly how we relate — and don't relate — to The New York Times.
What TodayHint is
TodayHint is a hint site, not an official companion app. We track the same publicly published puzzle data the New York Times' own apps use, and we write our own hints, strategy notes, and full-answer breakdowns on top of it — organized as a progressive ladder so a visitor who wants one small nudge isn't forced past it into a spoiler. Alongside the daily puzzles, the site publishes evergreen rules guides for each game and a growing archive of past answers, all under one editorial voice rather than syndicated or scraped copy.
How the hints are made
Hints are written fresh each day from the official puzzle of record, ladder-tested so each level spoils less than the next: theme interpretation and category naming come first, full answers come last, and nothing in between quietly gives away more than it claims to. Nothing here is guessed at ahead of time, pre-written before that day's puzzle is out, or recycled from a previous board. Where an automated writing step is used to draft a hint, that draft still has to clear a spoiler check tuned to that day's specific answers before it's allowed to publish — if it can't, the page falls back to hints built directly from the puzzle's own structure (word lengths, board layout, region counts) rather than shipping nothing at all.
Our update promise
Each day's hints for Strands, Connections, and Pips are published before midnight Eastern Time — in practice, usually earlier, since puzzle data becomes available a little ahead of the official release. That means you shouldn't run into a "no hints yet" wall for the current puzzle, no matter which time zone you're checking from. If a puzzle-provider outage ever prevents that, the site says so plainly on the page rather than serving something stale and pretending it's current.
Corrections
If a hint, an answer, or anything else on this site is wrong, that's worth fixing quickly, and the fix should show up everywhere that content appears, not just on the page you happened to flag. Email contact@todayhint.com with the page URL and what you expected instead. Corrections to puzzle data or hint text are made at the source, so they propagate automatically rather than being patched in one place and left wrong elsewhere.
Trademarks and affiliation
TodayHint is an independent, unofficial resource. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise officially connected to The New York Times Company. Strands, Connections, Pips, and NYT are trademarks of The New York Times Company; we use those names only to identify which official puzzles our hints refer to — a factual, nominative use, not a claim of any relationship. Every hint, strategy tip, and piece of commentary published on TodayHint is written by us: none of it reproduces The New York Times' own clues, hint text, or editorial copy. We have no advance access to unpublished puzzles and no relationship with the games' constructors or editors beyond crediting them by name, exactly as the Times itself publishes.
Contact
The same address handles corrections, privacy questions, and anything else: contact@todayhint.com. See also our privacy notice and terms of use for how the site handles data and what it does and doesn't promise.