NYT Mini Crossword Archive: Yesterday's Mini & Every Past Answer

About This NYT Mini Archive

This is a day-by-day archive of the NYT Mini Crossword, built from the official puzzle data rather than copied from other sites. It starts on November 13, 2025, covers every Mini since, and adds one puzzle each day.

Each row in the list gives the date, the grid size, the constructor and the answer to 1-Across. That first answer is usually enough to recognise a Mini you've already solved. Dates from August 1, 2026 on link to a full page for that puzzle, with every clue, a tap-to-reveal answer for each and the solved grid.

The ticket at the top always holds yesterday's Mini. For the newest puzzle, go to today's NYT Mini answers; it switches to the next day's Mini as soon as NYT releases it in the evening.

How to Find a Past NYT Mini

• By date. Use the month links above the list, open the month, and pick the day. The two most recent months are open by default.
• By answer. Type a word into the search box. It checks every Across and Down answer in the archive, highlights every Mini that used it and opens the right months.
• Yesterday. The ticket at the top always shows the previous day's Mini, solved, with every answer.
• A run of days. Every per-day page links to the day before and the day after, and lists the earlier days of the same month.

One thing to remember when you search by date: a Mini comes out the evening before its date (10 p.m. Eastern, or 6 p.m. for Sunday and Monday puzzles). If you solved it late at night, look under the next day.

How Often NYT Mini Answers Repeat

About one NYT Mini answer in five is a repeat. Across the 364 Minis from November 13, 2025 to November 11, 2026 there are 4,009 answers but only 3,119 different words, so 890 answers had already appeared in an earlier Mini.

The repeats are concentrated in a small group. Most words, 79% of the different answers, appeared exactly once all year. The regulars, on the other hand, come back again and again: EYE, YES, ONE, NET and TEN were each used seven times.

That's why the search box is useful beyond curiosity. If a three-letter answer is giving you trouble, there's a good chance the Mini has used it recently, and the search will show you the day and the clue on its per-day page.

The Longest NYT Mini Answers

A standard 5×5 Mini can't hold an answer longer than five letters, so long answers only appear when the grid grows. In this archive 26 answers ran to eight letters, the maximum.

All but one of them came on a Saturday, when the Mini expands to 7×7 or 8×7. Examples include SPELLING and SAMANTHA (November 22, 2025), RICKROLL (January 10, 2026), PANGRAMS and EDGED OUT (March 21, 2026) and HALL PASS (June 13, 2026).

The exception was STUFFING, in the 7×8 Mini on Thanksgiving Day 2025. It was a Thursday, and the only weekday Mini of the year big enough for an eight-letter answer.

The Most Repeated NYT Mini Clues

Some Mini clues don't just share an answer with an earlier puzzle; they repeat word for word. These came back most often between November 2025 and November 2026.

If one of these turns up in today's Mini, you already know the answer. Open the per-day pages for any date in the list to see the full set of clues in context.

Saturday Minis in the Archive

Saturday is when the NYT Mini stops being mini. All 52 Saturday puzzles in this archive were bigger than 5×5: forty were 7×7, four were 8×7, two were 8×8, and the rest were odd shapes such as 7×6 and 8×6.

They also hold the archive's clue record. The Saturday Mini of February 28, 2026 had 23 clues, more than twice a weekday Mini, and four eight-letter answers in a single grid.

To pull up just the Saturday puzzles, look for the larger sizes in the Size column of the list; every 7×7 and 8×8 entry is a Saturday.

Odd Minis Worth Revisiting

• Thanksgiving, November 27, 2025. A 7×8 grid on a Thursday, with STUFFING among its answers.
• April 3, 2026. The smallest grid in the archive, just six squares wide and four tall.
• August 6, 2026. The only Mini with a note: every answer rhymed with the last word of its clue.
• Halloween, October 31, 2026. The only Mini with a title, "Hybrid Candies".

These are easy to find with the month links, and the ones from August 2026 on have their own page with every clue.

Who Made the Minis in This Archive

Only seven constructors appear in the whole archive, and one of them dominates. Joel Fagliano, who created the Mini, made between 14 and 20 Minis in every full month of the past year, and 193 in all.

Sam Ezersky made 73, Christina Iverson 40 and Ian Livengood 37. Tracy Bennett, Wyna Liu and Adam Aaronson filled in the rest. With so few hands involved, the Mini's style changes very little from week to week, which makes old Minis good practice for new ones.

Each row in the list names the constructor, so you can follow a favourite through the year.

Using Old Minis to Get Faster

Speed in the Mini comes mostly from recognising answers instantly, and the archive is a ready-made study list.

1. Learn the regulars. Scan the "most common answers" chart above. Those words will turn up again within weeks.
2. Replay Saturdays. The bigger Saturday grids are where most solvers lose time. Work through a few past ones from their per-day pages, revealing one answer at a time.
3. Notice repeated clues. "Capital of Vietnam" has meant HANOI four times this year. When a clue looks familiar, it probably is.

For the full picture of how the Mini works, including its release schedule and size statistics, see today's NYT Mini answers.

How This NYT Mini Archive Is Built

Every entry comes from NYT's own puzzle files, collected automatically each day as soon as the new Mini is released. Before a puzzle is added, our pipeline checks that every clue's squares are filled and that the puzzle's date matches the day it was published, so a half-loaded or mislabelled grid never makes it in.

The year before our daily collection began was filled in the same way, one date at a time from the official files, with no gaps. Nothing in the archive is copied from another answer site.

If a day ever failed to load, it would simply be missing from the list rather than filled with a guess. So far, every day from November 13, 2025 on is present.

NYT Mini Archive FAQ