Mini Crossword answers archive

October 2026 (20)

September 2026 (12)

Four weeks of Minis in numbers

Before the list, a summary of the 28 Minis from 23 September to 20 October 2026, counted from the Times' puzzle data. It is the best quick picture of what the archive contains: mostly small square grids, one large grid a week, and a short roster of constructors.

Every puzzle in the window

The full list behind those numbers, oldest first. The pattern of one 7×7 every Saturday, with occasional 6×5 grids, is easy to see laid out like this:

Week by week

Grouped into four seven-day blocks, the window is remarkably even. The week of 23–29 September had 78 clues, 30 September–6 October had 75, 7–13 October had 76 and 14–20 October had 78. In every week the Saturday grid supplied about a fifth of the clues — 18, 14, 16 and 17 — and the other six days supplied 10 or 11 each. A week of Minis is therefore around 75 clues: shorter than one daily Times crossword, spread over seven days.

Using the archive

Each date opens the puzzle for that day. Saturdays are worth picking out if you want more to read: they are 7×7 with long answers running edge to edge. If you are looking for one particular clue, the quickest route is the date — the clue lists are short enough to scan in a few seconds.

The newest puzzle is always on today's answers page, the one before it on the yesterday page. For a clue-by-clue nudge on today's grid instead of answers, use the hints page.

The four Saturdays

Saturdays are the archive's highlights. On 26 September, Sam Ezersky's grid opened with WXYANDZ — "Alphabet song lyric before 'Now I know my ABCs'" — and packed in XBOXONE, YALELAW, ALFREDO and POLEAXE. On 3 October, Joel Fagliano used a diamond-shaped grid with twelve black squares, built around BARSOAP, ARMHOLE and TRAINER across and MERMAID, DASHIKI and SPOONED down.

Ian Livengood's 10 October Saturday had PENGUIN and ANATOMY across and BANDANA and YOUROCK — "Nice job, dude!" — down, along with STACK, one of the four answers that appeared twice in the window. And on 17 October Sam Ezersky stacked four full-width answers, CLASSIC, RICOTTA, OPENBAR and ARTGALA, across the top of the grid.

Where the long answers are

If you are browsing for the more interesting entries, go to the Saturdays. All 29 seven-letter answers in the window came from the four Saturday grids, along with four of the nine six-letter ones. They include ABALONE, clued on 26 September as a "Sea creature whose name sounds like 'Ah, baloney!'", GOLFTAN and ONADIET from the same grid; DASHIKI and SPOONED from 3 October; PAGODA, TUNICS, IDIOMS and PEANUT — "Tiny bit of packing material" — from 10 October; and RICOTTA, ACETONE and STBARTS from 17 October. The other five six-letter answers sat in the two 6×5 grids on 4 and 16 October.

What this archive does not include

Only the daily Mini is listed here. The Times' full-size Crossword and the Midi, its mid-sized puzzle added in February 2026, are separate puzzles and are not covered on HintSheet. Bonus Minis the Times publishes occasionally are not included either; the archive follows the one dated Mini per day from the Times' puzzle data.

One clue from each constructor

Five constructors made the 28 Minis in the window. A single clue from each, chosen from their puzzles, shows how much range fits inside a five-square answer:

• Joel Fagliano, 18 October — "Hard guy to find in a crowd?": WALDO.
• Sam Ezersky, 15 October — "Throw hard, in Gen Z slang": YEET.
• Ian Livengood, 19 October — "Number of clues in this puzzle": TEN.
• Christina Iverson, 24 September — "Attendees of the Jellicle Ball, on Broadway": CATS.
• Wyna Liu, 13 October — "One might have a litter ... or use it": CAT.

Clues that date themselves

Reading old Minis, you will notice how many clues lean on film, television and the news of the moment: Anthony Ramos of "Hamilton" on 30 September, Ron Burgundy of "Anchorman" on 10 October, the network that airs "Abbott Elementary" on 9 October, Tina Fey of "Mean Girls" on 12 October. Some are pinned to a season — on 4 October 2026, 7-Across was clued as "2026 N.B.A. champions" (KNICKS).

That is one reason the archive keeps each puzzle exactly as published. A clue is written for its date, and the archive records it as it stood on that date.

Patterns you will notice reading back

Read a week of Minis in a row and the house style becomes clear. Quoted-speech clues and fill-in-the-blank clues are the commonest kinds after plain definitions — 26 of each in our four-week count. Question-mark wordplay is rare, four in 307 clues, which is why those clues stand out: "Hard guy to find in a crowd?" on 18 October was WALDO.

Constructors leave fingerprints too. Cross-referenced pairs, where one answer is clued only as "See 4-Across," and twin clues, where one description fits two answers, were rarer still: three puzzles in the window used cross-references and two used twin clues. Puzzles by Joel Fagliano, who made 13 of the 28, account for both twin-clue days.

Where the data comes from

Each entry is copied automatically from the Times' published puzzle file for that date, including the grid, the clue text, the numbering and the constructor's name, and published at midnight Eastern on the date. Nothing is retyped or solved by hand, which is why the archive matches the game. If a date is missing, our daily fetch did not receive the Times' file for it.

HintSheet only lists the dates it has published itself; puzzles from before we added the Mini are not on this site.

Other archives

The same date-by-date archive exists for Wordle, Connections, Strands and Spelling Bee. The site-wide archive links to all of them, and the Mini Crossword guide explains the puzzle itself.

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