Tuesday’s NYT Mini Crossword is live, and today’s 5×5 grid, constructed by Ian Livengood, arrives with a mix that captures exactly what the Mini does best: workaday vocabulary sitting right beside an aviation term and a genuine slice of pop music history. Whether you cleared the board in under a minute or found yourself stalled on 1-Down longer than the puzzle deserved, the full set of verified answers is below.
The Mini resets at 10 p.m. Eastern on weeknights and Saturdays, which means today’s grid has been live since Monday evening. Spoiler-free hints appear first for readers who want a nudge rather than a full reveal. The complete answers follow immediately after.
NYT Mini Crossword Hints for June 16, 2026
Across Hints
- 1-Across: Think of the craftsman who applies mortar between bricks.
- 6-Across: A category that includes Swedish and German car brands.
- 7-Across: Two syllables. The word someone blurts out when something genuinely surprises them.
- 8-Across: A sanctuary. A place of peace and refuge.
- 9-Across: The key in the top-left corner of a Mac keyboard.
Down Hints
- 1-Down: A unit of speed measured relative to the speed of sound.
- 2-Down: The soft light surrounding a subject in a portrait. Also used in wellness contexts.
- 3-Down: To hold something off or keep it at bay. Often followed by “off.”
- 4-Down: What a slow leak does to a tire or a bathtub.
- 5-Down: The boy band that placed Justin Timberlake on the map before his solo career.
NYT Mini Crossword Answers for June 16, 2026
Across Answers
| Clue | Answer |
|---|---|
| 1-Across: Worker who sticks a thick mix on bricks | MASON |
| 6-Across: Volvos or VWs | AUTOS |
| 7-Across: “Wow, that’s wild!” | CRAZY |
| 8-Across: Peaceful place | HAVEN |
| 9-Across: Key above ~ on a Mac | ESC |
Down Answers
| Clue | Answer |
|---|---|
| 1-Down: ___ 1 (speed of sound) | MACH |
| 2-Down: Emanating glow | AURA |
| 3-Down: Fend (off) | STAVE |
| 4-Down: Seeps slowly | OOZES |
| 5-Down: Boy band with the 2000 hit “It’s Gonna Be Me” | NSYNC |
Clue-by-Clue Breakdown
1-Across: Worker who sticks a thick mix on bricks : MASON
MASON is the grid’s opening entry and one of its most satisfying solves. A mason works with mortar, the thick cement-based mixture applied between bricks or stone to bond them together. The word also carries a second life as a proper name and the root of “Freemason,” though neither of those angles is what Livengood is reaching for here. On a Tuesday grid, it is a clean, confident opener that plants the M squarely in the first cell, setting up the MACH crossing below.
6-Across: Volvos or VWs : AUTOS
AUTOS is the kind of fill that speeds up a solve rather than complicating it. Both Volvo (Swedish) and Volkswagen (German) are European automotive marques, and the clue leans on brand recognition rather than mechanical knowledge. The plural is the tell: the clue names two examples, so the answer needs to accommodate both under a single category label. AUTOS does that in five clean letters.
7-Across: “Wow, that’s wild!” : CRAZY
A conversational clue with a conversational answer. CRAZY, rendered here as an exclamation rather than a descriptor, is the Mini at its most colloquial. The quotation marks signal that the clue is capturing a spoken register, and “wild” is the synonym that closes the gap. No overthinking required; the challenge is simply remembering to resist the temptation to reach for a longer synonym.
8-Across: Peaceful place : HAVEN
HAVEN is one of those words that crossword grids return to reliably, and for good reason: it packs high semantic value into five letters with strong crossing potential. A haven is a refuge, a sanctuary, a shelter from disruption. Livengood uses the clue in its most literal sense, keeping it accessible while giving the grid a moment of calm before the final entry.
9-Across: Key above ~ on a Mac : ESC
ESC closes the Across section with a three-letter technology reference that almost every solver has at their fingertips, literally. On a standard Mac keyboard, the tilde key (~) sits in the upper left, and the Escape key is directly above it. ESC as an abbreviation is accepted crossword shorthand. It is the shortest answer in today’s grid and one of the fastest fills available.
1-Down: ___ 1 (speed of sound) : MACH
This is the puzzle’s trickiest clue, as noted by several solver communities after the grid went live Monday evening. MACH 1 is the threshold at which an aircraft reaches the speed of sound, approximately 767 miles per hour at sea level. The unit is named for Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, who studied the behavior of shock waves. For solvers who don’t immediately register the aviation context, the M provided by MASON crossing at 1-Across gives the foothold needed to unlock it. Casual solvers occasionally miscue toward MARK or MATH before the pattern clarifies.
2-Down: Emanating glow : AURA
AURA works in multiple registers simultaneously, which is part of its appeal as fill. In a scientific context, it refers to the luminous phenomenon observable around charged particles. In everyday use, it describes the invisible energy or presence a person projects. Livengood’s clue leans on the visual, “emanating glow,” making this one of the gentler Down entries and a reliable anchor for the grid’s midsection.
3-Down: Fend (off) : STAVE
STAVE is the kind of answer that rewards solvers who pay attention to idiomatic English. “Stave off” is a fixed phrase meaning to delay or ward off something unwanted: staving off hunger, staving off sleep, staving off defeat. The parenthetical “(off)” in the clue is Livengood’s signal that the answer is part of a phrasal construction. Without that signal, the word could mislead a solver toward STAFF or STAKE. With it, STAVE is the only clean fit.
4-Down: Seeps slowly : OOZES
OOZES is one of the more visually evocative fills in today’s grid. The double-O opening gives it an almost onomatopoeic quality, and the clue description, “seeps slowly,” captures the word’s essential meaning without ambiguity. Slow seepage is precisely what oozing implies, whether the subject is maple syrup, a punctured tire, or something less pleasant. The Z in the middle provides a useful confirmation letter at the crossing with CRAZY.
5-Down: Boy band with the 2000 hit “It’s Gonna Be Me” : NSYNC
The Down section’s standout entry. NSYNC’s It’s Gonna Be Me era produced one of the defining pop singles of the early 2000s, and “It’s Gonna Be Me” has since graduated from radio staple to enduring internet meme. The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 2000, the only chart-topper of the band’s career. For solvers of a certain generation, NSYNC is an immediate answer. For younger solvers, the “It’s Gonna Be Me” meme, which resurfaces every May Day, has kept the reference alive well into the 2020s. The crossing with HAVEN at the N provides a clean confirmation.
Difficulty Assessment: Tuesday, June 16, 2026
| Category | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Difficulty | Easy-Moderate | One genuine stumper among otherwise accessible fill |
| Trickiest Clue | 1-Down (MACH) | Aviation unit, requires specific knowledge to place cleanly |
| Fastest Fill | 9-Across (ESC) | Instant recognition for any Mac user |
| Cultural Reference | 5-Down (NSYNC) | Broad pop culture reach across multiple generations |
| Grid Construction | Clean | No obscure proper nouns, no abbreviation traps |
Speed-Solving Tips for Today’s Grid
For solvers chasing a personal best on today’s puzzle, the fastest entry point is 9-Across. ESC is a three-letter fill that any Mac user places instantly, and it plants the E and S that feed into HAVEN and STAVE respectively. From there, AUTOS at 6-Across follows quickly from the A provided by HAVEN, and OOZES at 4-Down locks in the Z that confirms CRAZY across the middle row.
The sequence that causes the most lost time is the MACH and MASON pairing at 1-Across and 1-Down. Most solvers enter MASON first, which deposits the M at the start position. That M is the correct first letter of MACH, but the aviation context of the Down clue is easy to miss under time pressure. If MASON goes in with confidence, pause for a single second before moving on and confirm the M is doing double duty. That habit recovers the MACH solve faster than any other approach.
For a complete overview of strategies for faster solve times across all difficulty levels, the Eastern Herald’s Mini Crossword guide covers grid mechanics, pattern recognition, and daily solving habits.
How Today’s Puzzle Compares to Recent Editions
Tuesday grids in the Mini have trended toward moderate accessibility in June 2026, and today’s puzzle holds to that pattern. The fill is cleaner than Saturday’s puzzle, which threaded a TEAM GOAL theme across three answers and required solvers to identify an overarching structural motif before the grid yielded. Today’s grid makes no such demands. It is a clean five-by-five with one genuine knowledge test in MACH, one vintage pop culture reference in NSYNC, and three fills that experienced solvers will place in seconds.
The inclusion of NSYNC is a notable editorial choice. Constructor Ian Livengood reaches back to the late 1990s boy band era, a reliable source of crossword material because the acts of that period enjoy a second wave of recognition thanks to streaming, nostalgia cycles, and meme culture. The broader New York Times Games catalog has increasingly folded pop culture anchors of this kind into Mini grids, particularly on weekdays when accessibility is prioritized over complexity.
Players who also track the full NYT Games daily suite can find today’s NYT Connections answers, Wordle, and Strands solutions in the Eastern Herald’s daily puzzle coverage.
About the NYT Mini Crossword
The New York Times Mini Crossword launched in 2014 as a compact companion to the flagship daily crossword, which runs on a 15-by-15 grid on weekdays and a 21-by-21 grid on Sundays. The Mini’s five-by-five format was designed for speed and accessibility, targeting players who wanted the satisfaction of completing a crossword in the time available between meetings or during a morning commute.
The puzzle is free to play for anyone with a New York Times account, accessible through the NYT website, the dedicated NYT Games app on iOS and Android, and the Play tab inside the main NYT News app. New puzzles go live at 10 p.m. Eastern on weeknights and Saturdays. Sunday’s edition drops at 6 p.m. Eastern on Saturday. Past puzzles are available to NYT Games and All Access subscribers. There is no streak mechanic as in Wordle, but the built-in timer lets players track personal bests and challenge friends through the leaderboard feature.
Over the past decade, the Mini has grown from a supplementary product to one of the most-played daily word games in the world, sitting alongside Wordle, Connections, and Strands as a core pillar of the New York Times digital puzzle ecosystem.
