The answer to today’s NYT Mini Crossword for August 31, 2026 is complete. All five Across and five Down answers are below.
Across: WEB, BEAU, TEARS, EARLY, CRY
Down: WEARY, EARL, BUSY, BEAR, TEC
Today’s grid leaned on compound phrases and familiar English idioms. Three of the five Across clues followed the fill-in-the-blank format – Spider WEB, Crocodile TEARS, and ___ wolf (CRY) – with EARLY bird completing the idiomatic run. BEAU was the outlier: a Gallicised term for a male admirer that crossed from French into 18th-century English and has held a gently antiquated charm in the language ever since. Its presence in a Monday grid signals a constructor comfortable reaching beyond the usual stock of short vowel-heavy filler.
On the Down side, WEARY was the most resonant answer for a Monday morning. It enters the grid from the top-left corner and shares its W with WEB. TEC – old detective-fiction shorthand for a private investigator – is the kind of vocabulary that rewards solvers who read widely. Rare enough to trip up players unfamiliar with Christie or Chandler, it was arguably today’s hardest answer. EARL completes a minor British-aristocracy pairing alongside BEAU’s Gallic borrowing, and BEAR (Panda ___) provides a clean, accessible entry to the lower half of the grid.
The BUSY bee and BEAR crossing in the right column gave constructors a tidy interlocking pair. Monday grids typically balance accessible idioms at the top with one less obvious term to reward broader vocabulary – TEC fills that role neatly today.
Yesterday’s solutions are in the NYT Mini Crossword answers for August 30, 2026. The Mini resets at midnight Eastern Time and is free to play at The New York Times Games page.
Related Posts
