Need help with today's NYT strand? Today's theme “Find your people” isn't too difficult, but finding the spangrams themselves can be quite challenging.

Below we have compiled some helpful hints for the #278 strand and some answers if you need them. We will start with a few hints and then work our way to the full answer for Strands #278.

WARNING: There are spoilers for Strands #278.

The official theme of NYT Strands #278 is... “Find a buddy.”

And here's an unofficial tip from me: ”By association.

If you're still in the dark, here are some useful words that give you valuable hint tokens:

Still struggling? Spangram gives you a hint on conjunctive words. Today it starts with 'F' and ends with 'P'.

Scroll down to see what it is.

FELLOWSHIP.

Now, what's the answer to today's strand?

Drumroll, please.

... Spangram was FELLOWSHIP.

Strands #278

“Find your people”

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Hello Strands fans! This spangram is one of those tricky ones that forms a circle (ironically and perhaps intentionally surrounding the word CIRCLE), but once you get the answer on board it is nice and easy.

Unfortunately, the “find a mate” theme was a bit too difficult for me to figure out right away and I had to use hints.

I was kicking myself when the CLUB was revealed, but now I had a hit list of likely words to look for; SOCIETY was in the lower left corner, GROUP was above it; “BUNCH” fit neatly under “SOCIETY” and “CROWD” was to the GROUP” was to the right of ”GROUP.

Now I finally figured out how the “Q” was placed on the right side. In other words, to spell out the spangram, all I had to do was follow the ring around the CIRCLE.

No, it was not HIPFELLOWS. In fact, it was FELLOWSHIP.

Are you reading this in a slow time zone? The full Strand Answer article from yesterday's Round 277 can be found here.