Sunday’s NYT Mini Crossword arrived early, as it always does on weekends, going live at 6 p.m. Eastern on Saturday evening. The May 31, 2026 puzzle is a clean five-by-five grid with no declared theme, but the ten clues pull from three distinct registers: wardrobe vocabulary, a postseason sports calendar, and the kind of kitchen-table English that has been embedded in American speech for generations. It moves fast, and the crossings are tight enough that one hesitation can ripple outward. Every answer is below, organized by section, with hints first and full solutions after a clear break for those still working through the grid.
How the NYT Mini Crossword Works
The NYT Mini is a compact daily puzzle built on a five-by-five grid, with five Across clues and five Down clues intersecting at shared letters. It was created by puzzle editor Joel Fagliano and has appeared inside the Times Games app daily since 2014. New editions drop at 10 p.m. Eastern on weekdays and Saturdays. Sunday’s puzzle posts earlier, at 6 p.m. Eastern on Saturday night. There is no streak counter the way Wordle tracks daily progress, but the built-in timer records every solve and lets players compete against themselves or friends through the leaderboard. The puzzle sits alongside Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, and the full-size New York Times Crossword inside the Games subscription, though the Mini remains one of the few still accessible to free account holders.
Today’s Clues and Hints: Across
1 Across: Ends of dress shirt sleeves
Five letters. The answer describes the structural finish at the wrist of a formal shirt, the part you roll up when the work gets serious or button tightly before a meeting. Starts with C.
6 Across: Month when the N.B.A. and N.H.L. playoffs start, typically
Five letters. Two major North American professional leagues historically begin their postseason in the same calendar month, a reliable seasonal anchor that crossword constructors return to regularly. Starts with A.
7 Across: Pilfered
Five letters. A past-tense verb meaning taken without permission. This is the easiest synonym clue in today’s grid. Starts with S.
8 Across: Played (with)
Five letters. An informal past-tense verb meaning fiddled or tinkered, usually followed by the word “with.” Starts with T.
9 Across: “Well, isn’t that the ___ calling the kettle black!”
Three letters. The missing word from one of English’s most recognizable idioms, a proverbial accusation of hypocrisy that dates back centuries.
Today’s Clues and Hints: Down
1 Down: Performers in a play
Four letters. The full collective noun for the ensemble of actors appearing in a theatrical production. Starts with C.
2 Down: “Gimme five!”
Five letters. The phrase called out during a celebratory high-five gesture, rendered here as two words compressed into one answer. Starts with U.
3 Down: Soft serve alternative, familiarly
Five letters. The tart frozen dessert that challenged ice cream’s grip on the American summer and spawned a dedicated chain restaurant industry. Starts with F. This is the trickiest entry in today’s puzzle for anyone who does not speak frozen-yogurt shorthand fluently.
4 Down: Boneless steakhouse order
Five letters. The premium cut most often wrapped in bacon on upscale restaurant menus, prized for its tenderness over its fat content. Starts with F.
5 Down: Winter ride
Four letters. A snow conveyance requiring no engine, only gravity and a well-packed hill. Starts with S.
Full Answers: Across
Spoilers follow. Scroll deliberately.
1 Across: CUFFS
6 Across: APRIL
7 Across: STOLE
8 Across: TOYED
9 Across: POT
Full Answers: Down
1 Down: CAST
2 Down: UPTOP
3 Down: FROYO
4 Down: FILET
5 Down: SLED
Grid and Clue Breakdown
CUFFS is a standard wardrobe entry that opens the grid cleanly. The clue “Ends of dress shirt sleeves” leaves no ambiguity. Solvers who locked in C immediately gained access to CAST at 1-Down, which shares its first letter, and that crossing effectively unlocks the entire top-left quadrant within the first two fills.
APRIL is the standout construction of the puzzle. By referencing both the N.B.A. and N.H.L. postseason calendars simultaneously, the clue requires the solver to triangulate two professional sports leagues to arrive at a single month. It is economical, accurate, and earns its place as the grid’s most satisfying Across entry. The previous Sunday Mini also leaned on sports shorthand as a structural anchor, a recurring editorial pattern worth tracking.
STOLE is a gimme by design. “Pilfered” maps to one five-letter past-tense verb with near-zero ambiguity, and the constructor placed it at 7-Across specifically to give solvers a momentum-building freebie after any difficulty in the upper portion of the grid.
TOYED is familiar but occasionally trips players who attempt to read the parenthetical “(with)” as misdirection. It is not. The entry is exactly the casual verb it appears to be.
POT completes the Across section with a cultural callback. “The pot calling the kettle black” is a proverbial idiom that appears in literature as far back as the 17th century and has been a crossword staple for decades precisely because it is three letters and universally recognized. At three squares, it fills the final Across slot without demanding any mental effort, which is the correct editorial decision at that position in a five-by-five grid.
FROYO is the puzzle’s lone colloquial challenge. “Soft serve alternative, familiarly” asks solvers to know both that frozen yogurt competes with soft serve and that the industry nickname FROYO is considered general enough for a Times puzzle. For anyone who came of age before the froyo chain boom of the 2010s, the answer may require crossing letters to confirm. The F is shared with FILET at 4-Down, making that intersection the most logistically important square in the lower half of the grid.
UPTOP rewards solvers who parse “Gimme five!” as a gesture phrase rather than a mathematical expression. The answer collapses “up top” into a single five-letter string, a construction choice that reflects the Mini’s increasing comfort with colloquial and informal register, a trend visible across recent puzzle editions this month.
SLED closes the Down section with the grid’s most visually simple answer. A winter ride requiring no engine is a sled, full stop, and the clue does exactly what a strong crossword clue should do at the end of a grid: confirm what the solver already knows and let them finish with confidence.
Speed-Solving Strategy for This Grid
The correct entry point is STOLE. It fills instantly and delivers crossing letters at 2-Down and 4-Down simultaneously. From there, FILET at 4-Down is obtainable with the F from FROYO or the letter scaffold from STOLE, and FROYO itself becomes manageable once its final Y is fixed from TOYED. The upper-left corner resolves in two moves: CUFFS into CAST. The lower-right corner resolves through POT into SLED. Solvers who avoid stalling on FROYO and use crossing letters rather than forcing the colloquial recall will find this grid finishes faster than its apparent difficulty suggests.
Today’s NYT Games Lineup
Sunday’s full puzzle slate is live. The NYT Spelling Bee reset at 3 a.m. Eastern with a new seven-letter honeycomb. The Connections grid released overnight. Wordle refreshes at midnight local time for all players. Each game sits inside the same Games subscription, and for many players the Mini has become the last stop on a morning ritual that starts with the Spelling Bee and ends when the crossword chime plays.
Sunday’s Mini drops at the most unhurried moment of the weekly puzzle calendar. The grid is generous without being trivial. CUFFS, APRIL, STOLE, TOYED, POT, CAST, UPTOP, FROYO, FILET, SLED. Ten words. One chime. See you at tomorrow’s grid.
