The NYT Mini Crossword answer set for Friday, August 14, 2026 covers five across and five down, with three across entries sharing the exact same clue text. Across: MOBS, MONEY, OCEAN, SHORE, SAND. Down: MOCHA, ONEON, BEARD, SYNE, MOSS.
NYT Mini Crossword Hints – August 14, 2026
Hint 1: Three of the five across answers share the exact same clue text. The grid asks you to find three different nouns from one repeated four-word clue, so the crossing letters do most of the disambiguation.
Hint 2: One of the down answers is a compound of two words you would never normally write together. The clue is a familiar idiom: two of the answer’s five letters belong to a word meaning the number after zero, and the other three spell a preposition.
Hint 3: Another down clue names a historical pirate by describing his most famous physical feature rather than his real name. Edward Teach is better known by what that feature produced.
NYT Mini Crossword Answers – August 14, 2026
Across
1-Across: MOBS (“Unruly crowds”)
5-Across: MONEY (“What ‘clams’ and ‘cheddar’ are slang for”)
6-Across: OCEAN (“This, at the beach”)
7-Across: SHORE (“This, at the beach”)
8-Across: SAND (“This, at the beach”)
Down
1-Down: MOCHA (“Chocolaty coffee drink”)
2-Down: ONEON (“Pull a fast ____ [trick]”)
3-Down: BEARD (“‘Black’ facial feature for pirate Edward Teach”)
4-Down: SYNE (“Auld Lang ____”)
5-Down: MOSS (“Growth at the base of a tree”)
The most striking construction in today’s grid is the three-identical-clue sequence. 6-Across (OCEAN), 7-Across (SHORE), and 8-Across (SAND) all carry the clue “This, at the beach,” the same four words applied three times running. The Mini uses this device to build a loose theme inside the five-across framework, and today’s trio does form a coherent beach scene: the water, the land at its edge, and the ground underfoot. Solvers who fill in any one from crossing letters typically unlock the other two quickly.
ONEON is the entry most likely to stall a solve. The full idiom is “pull a fast one on” someone, meaning to deceive them. In crossword form, the answer is written as five continuous letters without any break, so the ONE-ON boundary only becomes visible once the crossings reveal it. BEARD uses Edward Teach as a clue by description: Teach was the eighteenth-century English pirate known as Blackbeard, so his “black” facial feature was his BEARD. Withholding the famous nickname forces solvers to reconstruct the alias from its component parts. SYNE (4-Down) is Scots meaning “since” or “long ago,” familiar to most English speakers only through the New Year’s song, which means “for old times’ sake.”
Yesterday’s full grid is in the NYT Mini Crossword answers for August 13, 2026, which featured PINK, LANAI, ORBIT, REEL, and END across.
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