I love a good NYT Mini Crossword puzzle challenge, and today’s clue, “Synonym for ‘nearby’”, is the clue for one past and eight past, making it a tricky one to crack. So, here are the answers to both clues.

The answer to the "Synonym for nearby" one-across clue from the October 9 NYT Mini Crossword puzzle is "SHUT." And the "synonym for nearby" eight-across clue answer is "NEAR." Nearby is a homograph. Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.

So, close can be used in a sentence like "close the door!" or it can be used to say, "We are close to our destination." Both statements and their meanings are different, but they are spelled the same, which is why homographs are difficult to solve in crosswords.

This clue was tricky to solve because, as you saw earlier, close is a homograph, which makes it even trickier to solve because you can never really know which version of the word to use to get the answer. I ended up having to solve a few surrounding clues to get both answers. But because these clues were so tricky, I give it a difficulty rating of five out of five.