Strategy guides › Mini Crossword
How to solve our 5×5 mini crossword in the right order
1-Across asks for a police officer, informally, in three letters. You type COP without thinking, and then 4-Across wants “conscious and alert” in five letters, and nothing comes. Do not stare at it. In our minis you almost never have to solve a clue cold, because the grid hands you most of the letters if you go in the right order.
How a mini is put together
The grids come from a small program we wrote, and knowing how it works tells you what to expect. It picks one of a handful of grid shapes, all five by five with black squares placed in mirror symmetry, and fills them by trial and error from a list of 2,295 common English words: 435 of three letters, 1,148 of four and 712 of five. A word can only appear once in a grid. The fill list is deliberately plain. It includes ordinary plurals and verb forms, and it leaves out the obscure short words that big crosswords lean on.
The clues are not written by a person. Once a grid is filled, an AI model drafts a short clue for every entry, and the script checks each one before it is kept: a clue that is missing, or that contains its own answer, sends the whole grid back. If a clue strikes you as off, tell us on the contact page and we will fix it.
One puzzle breaks the pattern. The first in the archive, #000, is a word square with no black squares at all: HEART, EMBER, ABUSE, RESIN and TREND read the same across and down.
Across the other 44 puzzles, four shapes are in use. The two most common, with 17 puzzles each, cut a pair of black squares out of two opposite corners: either two squares side by side on one row, or two stacked in one column. Every one of the 45 puzzles has exactly ten entries. Of the 450 answers, 192 have five letters, 164 have four and 94 have three.
Every letter gets two clues
Here is the property that makes minis friendly. In all 45 grids, every one of the 949 white squares sits in both an across entry and a down entry. There is no letter you can only get from one clue. So when a clue means nothing to you, it is not a dead end; it is a word you will finish from the other direction.
That also means the order you solve in matters more than in a big crossword. Each answer you place feeds letters to every word that crosses it.
Solve alternate downs, then read the rows
The strongest move in a mini is to fill words that cross a long row at alternate squares. We tested how much each pattern of known letters narrows a word down, using the same fill list the generator draws from. For a five-letter answer, knowing just its first letter leaves about 47 candidates on average. Knowing the first and last leaves a median of 5. But knowing letters one, three and five leaves a median of exactly 1: for 99 of the 192 five-letter answers in the archive, exactly one word in the list fits those three letters.
So a good opening, whichever grid you get: find the downs that cross the full-width rows at the first, middle and last squares, and solve those first. In the 27 grids whose black squares sit on the top and bottom rows, three rows run the full width, and the left, middle and right downs cross all three of them. In the 17 grids with stacked corner squares, only the middle row is full width, but the same three downs still cross it. In the word square, every row is full width. Then read each row as a pattern. Often it solves itself; at worst you are choosing between two or three words, and the clue decides.
The same idea works on four-letter answers, a little less strongly. With two alternate letters known, the median is four or five candidates left. Three-letter words are the opposite: the first letter alone still leaves about 24 choices, so treat them as the gift words you solve from the clue and use to start a corner.
Words the archive loves
Because all but one grid is filled from the same list under the same rules, some words come back again and again. RED appears in 8 of the 45 puzzles, always as a short entry, clued as the colour of a fire truck, a stop sign and so on. ORAL and AUTO turn up 6 times each. BEGIN, AREAS, OMEN, ISLE, TRADE and IDLE are in 5 puzzles each. If a three-letter colour clue appears, try RED before you think.
The letters follow the same plain pattern. E is 20% of every letter in the archive, more than twice the next one (A at 9.6%), and 42% of all letters are vowels. The last letter of an answer is an E 128 times out of 450; T and D come next with 52 each, then S with 48. Forty answers end in ED. When an across clue is in the past tense or a plural, fill in the last one or two letters straight away, and the crossing downs get a free letter.
Use Check, not Reveal
Our ✓ Check button marks the squares that are wrong and nothing else: it does not give away a letter, and it does not stop your time from counting on the leaderboard. Only 👁 Reveal does that. So Check freely, especially after you have filled a row from crossing letters and are not sure about one of the downs. A single wrong letter in a crossing square quietly poisons two words, and finding it early is cheaper than finding it at the end.
Practice
Today’s mini is the one to try: before you read any across clue past 1-Across, solve the left, middle and right downs, then read the rows as patterns. Count how many rows fill themselves.
Three downs, then read across. The grid does the rest.
