NYT Mini Crossword Answers and Hints for Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026: Two Wordplay Clues on a Five-by-Five Grid

The New York Times (NYT) Mini Crossword for Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, is a five-by-five grid with 10 clues by Joel Fagliano. Two of them are wordplay, and two black squares in the bottom right corner shorten the last answers. Below is a hint for every clue, each one hidden until you open it, then the full answers in a marked spoiler section.

Hints for every clue

Across

• 1-Across (5 letters), Say “C-H-E-E-S-E”?

  the question mark means wordplay. You are saying the word one letter at a time.
• 6-Across (5 letters), Number of stripes on many world flags

  count the bands on the flags of France, Italy or Germany.
• 7-Across (5 letters), Places visited on a Clue board

  the Kitchen, the Ballroom and the Library are three of them.
• 8-Across (4 letters), “Go back” command

  the opposite of redo, often Ctrl+Z on a keyboard.
• 9-Across (4 letters), Follower of six or seven, but not five

  add it to six or seven to make a number word; five takes a different spelling.

Down

• 1-Down (5 letters), Walk with swagger

  what a model does down a runway.
• 2-Down (5 letters), What gets texts (and also scrolls?)

  the device in your pocket.
• 3-Down (5 letters), Wear away slowly

  what water does to rock over centuries.
• 4-Down (5 letters), Kind of juice in a French 75 cocktail

  a yellow citrus fruit.
• 5-Down (3 letters), ”___ Misérables”

  the French word for “the” before a plural noun, from Victor Hugo’s novel.

Solving tips

Start with the gimmes. 6-Across is a number, 4-Down is a fruit and 5-Down comes from a famous title. Those three cross the top half of the grid. Then try 1-Down, which shares its first letter with 1-Across. Leave the two wordplay clues, 1-Across and 9-Across, until a few letters are in place. The bottom row ends at the fourth column.

Keep a streak log on our printable weekly calendar or the October 2026 printable calendar.

More of today’s puzzles: Wordle hints, Connections hints, Strands hints, Spelling Bee hints and Pips hints. Monday’s grid is in our Mini answers for Oct. 26.

Today’s NYT Mini answers (spoilers)

Stop here if you still want to solve it yourself.

Clue	Answer
1-Across	Spell
6-Across	Three
7-Across	Rooms
8-Across	Undo
9-Across	Teen
1-Down	Strut
2-Down	Phone
3-Down	Erode
4-Down	Lemon
5-Down	Les

To spell “cheese” is to say C-H-E-E-S-E. Sixteen and seventeen end in “teen,” while five becomes fifteen. The answers come from the puzzle’s official data.