In case you missed Tuesday’s NYT Mini Crossword puzzle, you can find the answers here:
Wednesday is upon us and with it, more puzzles and riddles and other obstacles to overcome. Most of those obstacles are somewhat dire: We must work and make money so that we can keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. We must entertain ourselves to that existential dread doesn’t set in. We must see to the needs of others and balance those against our own, and so on and so forth. But the NYT Mini Crossword is a lower-stakes obstacle, and that is definitely—as the kids say—my jam.
The Mini is a smaller, quicker, more digestible, bite-sized version of the larger and more challenging NYT Crossword, and unlike its larger sibling, it’s free-to-play without a subscription to The New York Times. You can play it on the web or the app, though you’ll need the app to tackle the archive.
A few hints for the tougher ones in case you don’t just want the answers right away:
- 1 Across — Don’t spout. It’s the last . . .
Seriously, that clue alone should get you there.
While some of today’s words are pretty simple, some might have you stumped. You’ll find the answers below. Spoilers ahead, obviously. Skip ahead for the image of today’s solved puzzle.
ACROSS
1. The tip of a sippy cup, essentially — STRAW
6. It’s considered to be both a percussion and a stringed instrument — PIANO
7. Knight’s attire — ARMOR
8. More than just wants — NEEDS
9. Circus safety feature — NET
DOWN
1. Length of a bridge — SPAN
2. “Flat” or “spare” item — TIRE
3. Noodles eaten with chashu pork — RAMEN
4. One end of a battery — ANODE
5. Superlative seen on a Razzie Award — WORST
I admit, I was massively thrown off by 1 Across, which I thought would be ‘SPOUT’ because a sippy cup has a spout, not a straw. The creator of this Mini Crossword has gone a bridge’s SPAN too far with this one. Some cups for infants and toddlers have straws, but sippy cups have spouts. They don’t essentially have straws. They have spouts. Period.
I was so stumped by this, that I got completely turned around by the rest of the puzzle, because the starting letter of each word is the same. So I got SPOUT then PIANO then ARMOR then NEEDS and then I got stuck because none of the DOWN words made any sense. When I finally changed SPOUT to STRAW, that’s when I got TIRE and RAMEN and ANODE and WORST. Tricky puzzle. Very tricky.
How did you do on today’s Mini Crossword? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.
If you also play Wordle, I write guides about that as well. You can find those and all my TV guides, reviews and much more here on my blog. Thanks for reading!
