The NYT Mini Crossword answers for Friday, July 31, 2026 are: LIVE, LEVEL, PAIRS, GREY and AND across; LEARN, IVIED, VERY, ELS and LPGA down.
Today’s grid is built around a three-part theme phrase: 1-Across (LIVE), 8-Across (AND), and 1-Down (LEARN) together spell out LIVE AND LEARN, the idiom for growing wiser through experience. Three hints are below before the full breakdown.
Hint 1: Three entries combine to form a four-word idiom about learning from mistakes. One is an Across, one is a Down, and one connects them.
Hint 2: One Across answer is a mustard brand famous for a very polite TV commercial.
Hint 3: One Down clue signals its own answer by capitalizing certain letters inside the clue text itself.
Across
1A: LIVE (With 8-Across and 1-Down, grow from your own mistakes). The first piece of today’s theme phrase, anchoring the top-left corner and setting up the spanning construction across and down.
5A: LEVEL (Video game section). A stage or floor within a game, the unit of progress that players complete before advancing. In puzzle grids, the word runs five letters cleanly across the second row.
6A: PAIRS (Figure skating duos). The Olympic discipline in which two skaters perform lifts, spins, and side-by-side elements as a unit. Pairs skating is the oldest of the four figure skating disciplines at the Winter Games.
7A: GREY (___ Poupon, mustard brand). Grey Poupon is a Dijon-style mustard brand best known for a long-running television campaign in which passengers in adjacent luxury cars exchange jars through their windows. The ads became a cultural shorthand for upper-class politeness throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
8A: AND (See 1-Across). The connector in LIVE AND LEARN, a three-letter bridge that holds the idiom together. Filling the bottom row alongside the Down answers it crosses.
Down
1D: LEARN (See 1-Across). The closing word of LIVE AND LEARN, running down the left column from the shared L with 1-Across. The full idiom implies that mistakes are not wasted if they leave you better informed than before.
2D: IVIED (Like the outfield walls at Wrigley Field). The ivy that covers Wrigley Field’s brick outfield wall was planted in 1937 and has been a defining feature of the Chicago Cubs’ home ever since. A ball disappearing into the vines is a ground-rule double under official rules. IVIED as an adjective also describes the brick buildings of Ivy League campuses, though the sports reference is the sharper clue.
3D: VERY (Extremely). A clean four-letter intensifier crossing LEVEL at its third letter and GREY at its fourth.
4D: ELS (Letters capitalized in this cLue). The clue contains two capital L’s where they do not belong: capitaLized and cLue. Those stray capitals are the answer: ELS, the plural of the letter L. It is the wittiest clue in today’s grid, a puzzle inside the clue itself.
5D: LPGA (Sports org. for Nelly Korda). The Ladies Professional Golf Association, the primary women’s professional golf tour. Nelly Korda, the American golfer who dominated the 2024 and 2025 LPGA seasons with multiple major titles, is one of the tour’s most recognizable names.
Two days ago, the NYT Mini Crossword for July 29, 2026 featured the Beauty and the Beast rose at 5-Across and the wryest clue of the week in YES as the never-honest answer to terms-and-conditions. The July 28 Mini Crossword is also in the archive. The Mini Crossword resets at 10 p.m. ET, and the August 1 puzzle will be live at that time.
