The NYT Mini Crossword answers today, for Sunday, August 23, 2026, are MASON, AMPLE, GUILT, SKI, and EYE across, with MAG, AMUSE, SPIKY, OLLIE, and NET down.
The grid is back to the usual 5×5. Saturday is the one day The Mini stretches to 7×7, so if yesterday’s felt twice the size, it was.
NYT Mini Crossword Hints for August 23, 2026
- 1-Across is half of a surveying pair that ended up marking a cultural divide.
- 7-Across is what Shaggy’s narrator is, whatever he claims.
- 3-Down describes a fruit banned on the Singapore metro for its smell.
- 4-Down is the trick every skateboarder learns first.
- Two of the across answers are three letters and sit directly on top of each other.
NYT Mini Crossword Answers Today, August 23, 2026: Across
1-Across, “___-Dixon line”: MASON
6-Across, “More than enough”: AMPLE
7-Across, “Obvious verdict in Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me'”: GUILT
8-Across, “Hit the slopes”: SKI
9-Across, “Something to ‘keep on the prize'”: EYE
NYT Mini Crossword Answers Today, August 23, 2026: Down
1-Down, “People or Rolling Stone, for short”: MAG
2-Down, “Make laugh”: AMUSE
3-Down, “Like the skin of a durian fruit”: SPIKY
4-Down, “Skate park jump”: OLLIE
5-Down, “Part of a ping-pong table”: NET
A Grid With Only Four Black Squares
We reconstructed the board from the answers to check them, and all twenty-five squares agree. Here is the shape it makes.
The top three rows are full width and stacked solid: MASON, AMPLE, GUILT, fifteen letters with nothing blocked out. The bottom two rows keep only the middle three columns, giving SKI sitting directly above EYE, with black squares at both ends of both rows. Four black squares in the whole puzzle.
Holding it together are the three downs that run the full depth. AMUSE in column two, SPIKY in column three, OLLIE in column four. Every letter in the bottom half of the grid belongs to one of those three, which means the short across answers are not really separate clues at all. Solve the long downs and SKI and EYE fill themselves in.
That is the second day running the Mini has been built this way. Saturday’s 7×7 did the same thing with EGG YOLK, SAMURAI and I’M A MESS holding up the middle. If you are stuck on a Mini, the columns are usually where the puzzle actually lives.
The Clue Worth Reading Twice
9-Across is clued as something to “keep on the prize”. The quotation is missing a word, and that is the joke: the phrase is keep your eye on the prize, and the missing word is the answer. It is the same trick Saturday’s puzzle played when it clued HANGMAN as “_a_er and _encil game”.
Today’s other puzzles: the Wordle answer and Strands spangram are published every morning alongside this one.
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