NYT Mini Crossword Solutions and Clues for June 17, 2025

The Mini serves as a condensed edition of The New York Times’ esteemed daily crossword. Unlike the full crossword, which demands extensive knowledge and a great deal of patience to solve, The Mini offers a distinctly different atmosphere.

Featuring just a few clues to tackle, the daily puzzle becomes a racing challenge for numerous players.

Words, words and more words. Amazing how many different kinds of puzzles we’ve come up with that revolve around words. The crossword is one of the oldest in modern times. The very first crossword puzzle was published on December 21, 1913 in the New York World newspaper and was originally called the FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle. It looked like this:

I think you could safely call that a Saturday Mini Crossword puzzle, or somewhere between that and a regular-sized crossword. The diamond shape is interesting, but the fact that there are four letters that have no “Across” or “Down” associated with them even more so. A single word is used twice for an answer as well. See if you can solve it! I’ll post the solutions below. The rules we abide by now were not fully formed in 1913. In any case, we have our own Mini to solve.

The NYT Mini is a smaller, quicker, more digestible, bite-sized version of the larger and more challenging NYT Crossword, and unlike its larger sibling, it’s free-to-play without a subscription to The New York Times. You can play it on the web or the app, though you’ll need the app to tackle the archive.