The NYT Mini Crossword answer set for Thursday, August 13, 2026 covers five across and five down, with one compact geographic clue and a compound answer that resists easy parsing. Across: PINK, LANAI, ORBIT, REEL, END. Down: PAREN, INBED, NAIL, KIT, LORE.
NYT Mini Crossword Hints – August 13, 2026
Hint 1: One of the across answers names a small Hawaiian island recognizable to anyone who has flown between the islands, or who knows it from a certain long-running television sitcom set in Miami.
Hint 2: The longest down answer is an informal shortening of a grammatical term that refers to the characters (and). You have been using what it names your entire life without necessarily knowing it had its own word.
Hint 3: One of the down clues describes a domestic morning scene so ordinary that the five-letter answer hiding inside it is easy to miss because it reads as two separate words rather than one entry.
NYT Mini Crossword Answers – August 13, 2026
Across
1-Across: PINK (“Like flamingos and cherry blossoms”)
5-Across: LANAI (“Hawaiian island visible from Maui’s west shore”)
6-Across: ORBIT (“Planet’s path”)
7-Across: REEL (“Short Instagram video”)
8-Across: END (“Break off, as a relationship”)
Down
1-Down: PAREN (“( or ), for short”)
2-Down: INBED (“Where Mother’s Day breakfast might be served”)
3-Down: NAIL (“Tiny thing to paint”)
4-Down: KIT (“First-aid container”)
5-Down: LORE (“Origin stories, e.g.”)
The clue worth pausing on is 2-Down, INBED. Written out, it reads as two words rather than one crossword entry, and the domestic warmth of the clue reinforces that natural split. Players sounding it out as two units often stall on the five-letter count before the compound clicks. PAREN is the other strong entry: the clue uses the actual characters being defined, a self-referential construction that rewards anyone who reads the question mark as an invitation to take the clue literally. LANAI, the small island off Maui’s western coast, asks for one piece of geography. Players who recognize it from The Golden Girls, where the outdoor sitting area bears the same name, have a useful secondary path to the answer. NAIL is Thursday’s quietest misdirection: fingernails are tiny things to paint, but a literal nail is not, and the clue gives no indicator of which reading to take first.
Yesterday’s full grid is in the NYT Mini Crossword answers for August 12, 2026, which featured WNBA, HORSE, ALOHA, TAKES, and NEST across.
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