Here are all the answers for the NYT Mini Crossword on Sunday, August 2, 2026.
Across
1A: WIFI – “Something you might ask for while staying over at a friend’s house”
5A: SCIFI – “Genre for ‘Stranger Things'”
7A: JEANS – “Unlikely pants to wear to a wedding”
8A: STOP – “Octagonal sign word”
9A: STY – “Where sows are housed”
Down
1D: WSJ – “Newspaper that covers the stock market, for short”
2D: ICES – “Puts a cold pack on”
3D: FIATS – “Official decrees”
4D: IFNOT – “‘Otherwise …'”
6D: ISPY – “Words before ‘with my little eye,’ in a game”
Clue Notes
5A SCIFI uses Stranger Things as its pop-culture anchor. The Netflix series, set in Hawkins, Indiana, and drawing on the science-fiction and horror films of the 1980s, remains one of the most recognisable genre touchstones available to a crossword clue writer. SCIFI as a compressed two-syllable rendering of science fiction became standard in informal usage long before it appeared on any official style sheet.
7A JEANS lands its clue through social convention rather than definition: blue jeans are casual enough that their presence at a formal event reads as a mild violation of dress codes. The pants themselves take their name from Genoa, Italy – Gênes in French – where the heavy cotton twill fabric was produced before Levi Strauss adapted it for workwear in California in the 1870s.
3D FIATS takes the plural of fiat – an authoritative decree issued without deliberation or consent – and separates it cleanly from the Italian car brand. Both share Latin roots: fiat is the third-person singular present subjunctive of fieri (to be done or to become), meaning “let it be done.” The car company adopted the word because the brand name is also an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino.
6D ISPY cues the children’s guessing game I Spy, in which a player silently selects a visible object and announces “I spy with my little eye something beginning with the letter ___” while others guess. The game traces its modern form to a 1942 book series, though similar games appear in Victorian parlour-game collections. I Spy is also a long-running British television programme in which hidden objects are spotted by child viewers – and, separately, a 1960s American spy comedy series.
For more Mini Crossword solutions, see the answers for August 1, 2026 (featuring 6D CLAUDE as Anthropic’s AI assistant) and July 31, 2026.
