NYT Mini Crossword Answers Today, November 13, 2026

Joel Fagliano built the New York Times (NYT) Mini Crossword for Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, a 5-by-5 grid with 10 clues and two black squares side by side in the bottom left corner. Each clue has a hint that opens on a tap; the filled grid sits in the marked spoiler section at the end.

Hints for every clue

Across

• 1-Across (5 letters), England’s neighbor to the west

  a country, not a county; it starts with W and ends with S, the letter that opens 5-Down.

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  Wales
• 6-Across (5 letters), Something a selfie taker tries to get right

  the tilt of the phone relative to your face; it starts with A and ends with E.

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  Angle
• 7-Across (5 letters), Where emails pile up

  the folder where new messages land; it starts with I, and its last letter is the X in the middle of 5-Down.

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  Inbox
• 8-Across (5 letters), “I love you a ___!” (coffee drinker’s pun)

  read the quoted line aloud and the blank sounds like a phrase for “very much”; the spelling in the grid names a milky espresso drink. It starts with L and ends with E.

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  Latte
• 9-Across (3 letters), End of a mathematical proof

  three capital letters that stand for a phrase; it starts with Q, a letter that appears nowhere else in the grid, and ends with D.

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  Qed

Down

• 1-Down (4 letters), Cry loudly

  what a siren does; it starts with W, the same letter that opens 1-Across.

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  Wail
• 2-Down (4 letters), Actress Kendrick of “Pitch Perfect”

  her first name, which reads the same forward and backward; it starts with A.

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  Anna
• 3-Down (5 letters), Pride initials

  five capital letters with no vowel among them; it starts with L and ends with the grid’s lone Q.

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  Lgbtq
• 4-Down (5 letters), Mexican street corn

  a Spanish word for corn on the cob; it starts and ends with the same vowel.

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  Elote
• 5-Down (5 letters), High school health class topic, for short

  a two-word school subject joined into one entry; it starts with S, ends with D and holds two of the same vowel.

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  Sexed

Friday’s grid, clue by clue against Thursday’s

Start with 8-Across if you want the day’s one trick. The clue is a spoken pun, so the answer is a word you say out loud and then respell: the coffee in the parenthesis points at the drink, while the quoted sentence points at the sound. Every other clue is a plain definition, a name or an abbreviation.

Sorted by what they ask for, the 10 clues fall into these groups:

Clue type	Count	Clues
Plain definition	2	7-Across, 1-Down
Name or trivia	3	1-Across, 2-Down, 4-Down
Abbreviation answer	3	3-Down, 5-Down, 9-Across
Wordplay on the printed words	1	6-Across
Fill-in-the-blank pun	1	8-Across
Question mark	0	none

Only 3-Down (“initials”) and 5-Down (“for short”) flag the abbreviation in the clue. 9-Across gives no such signal, so its three letters have to come from the crossings or from knowing the phrase. Thursday’s Mini had no abbreviation answer, and its one fill-in-the-blank asked for an author’s surname.

The constructor is the same as Thursday’s, Joel Fagliano, but the black squares moved. Counted from the saved data:

Count	Thu., Nov. 12	Fri., Nov. 13
Black squares	2	2
Where they sit	Top left and bottom right	Side by side, bottom left
White squares	23	23
Across lengths	4, 5, 5, 5, 4	5, 5, 5, 5, 3
Down lengths	5, 5, 5, 4, 4	4, 4, 5, 5, 5
Three-letter entries	0	1
Four-letter entries	4	2
Five-letter entries	6	7
Full-width Across entries	3	4
Full-height Down entries	3	3

Both grids keep 23 white squares, but Friday’s four top rows are open from edge to edge. That makes 1-Across and 8-Across the long anchors: each one crosses all five Down entries, while 9-Across touches only the three on the right. The two Down entries on the left stop one row early, at four letters.

Our Mini Crossword page covers how the Mini plays; Friday’s last row has only three squares to fill.

Keep the solve on the November 2026 printable calendar or the printable weekly calendar.

More for Friday, Nov. 13: Wordle hints, Connections hints, Strands hints, Spelling Bee hints and Pips hints. Thursday’s grid is in the Mini answers for Nov. 12.

Today’s NYT Mini answers (spoilers)

Stop here if you still want to solve it yourself. Two entries are abbreviations: quod erat demonstrandum (QED) and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ).

Clue	Answer
1-Across	Wales
6-Across	Angle
7-Across	Inbox
8-Across	Latte
9-Across	QED
1-Down	Wail
2-Down	Anna
3-Down	LGBTQ
4-Down	Elote
5-Down	Sexed

The answers come from the puzzle’s official data.

Yesterday's Mini Crossword answer

The Mini on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026: Across 1 Blue, 5 Bronx, 6 Aioli, 7 Unfit, 8 Meat; Down 1 Brine, 2 Loofa, 3 Unlit, 4 Exit, 5 Baum. Yesterday's hints and full solution.