LinkedIn Pinpoint: how the game works, how to win in two clues, and today's answer

What Pinpoint is, in one paragraph

Pinpoint is a word-association game published by LinkedIn in its Games hub, alongside Crossclimb, Queens, Tango, Zip, Mini Sudoku, Patches and Wend. There is one puzzle a day, released at midnight Pacific time, and each carries a number: #893 was the puzzle for 10 October 2026, and the numbers in our archive run consecutively, one per day. When you start the game the first clue appears — in our archive a clue is anything from a single word (Iron, Delta) to a phrase (Look the other, Nine times out of). You type a guess into the Guess the category field; if it is wrong, the next clue is revealed. Name the category before the five clues run out and you win; run out and you lose, and the answer is shown either way. After the round the results page compares your score with averages for all members, your company and CEOs, tracks your streak, and lets you share the result or join the day's discussion post.

The clue order does a lot of the work. In our 38 puzzles the fifth clue is often written to settle the matter: 19 of the 38 final clues carry a gloss in brackets or after a colon — “Tie (used to avoid a draw)”, “Descartes: “I think, therefore I am””, “Sean Connery (first in "Dr. No")”. The early clues are bare words that fit several categories at once: Iron opened both #862 (words that come before “age”) and #877 (things associated with steam).

The rules LinkedIn's Help page states

The Help page for Pinpoint is short. What it says, and what follows from it:

• You guess the category, not a member. LinkedIn describes Pinpoint as guessing “the common category or theme linking a set of words”. In our archive the answers are written as group names — “Types of whales”, “Parts of the ear”, “Words that come before “ten”” — so phrase your guess as a group too. LinkedIn does not publish how closely a guess has to match its wording.
• A wrong guess is how the next clue arrives. The Help page describes one way forward: “If your guess is incorrect, the next clue from the set will be revealed.” Every guess you make either wins or buys the next clue.
• Five clues is the ceiling. “If you exhaust all the clue reveals without guessing the correct common category, you lost the game, and the answer will be displayed.” Streaks count consecutive days won, so a lost game does not extend one (LinkedIn's Streaks Help page).
• One puzzle per day, tied to Pacific time. New puzzles are released at midnight PT, and the previous puzzle expires at that moment and can no longer be played. Midnight PT is 3 AM Eastern and, while the US and the UK are both on summer time, 8 AM in London.
• Fewer reveals is better. The instruction is to “guess the category with as few clue reveals as possible”. After the round, the results page compares your score with averages for all members, your company and CEOs, and the connections leaderboard ranks you among connections who have opted in.

How Pinpoint categories are built

We sorted every puzzle in our archive — #856 to #893, 3 September to 10 October 2026, 38 puzzles — by the kind of category it uses. Five families cover all of them.

Plain sets (10 of 38) — members of an ordinary group: Types of whales (Blue, Right, Bowhead…), Blood types, Wind instruments, Parts of the ear. These are the most literal puzzles; the clues are members and the answer is the group's name.

Word partners (14 of 38) — the commonest family in our window. Every clue pairs with one hidden word: Make, Wrong, Right of, Milky → “way” (#856); Hang, Perfect, Top, Count to → “ten” (#893). Thirteen are phrased “Words that come before/after …”; one (#871) is place names preceded by “Great” — Sandy Desert, Salt Lake, Barrier Reef. If two clues share no meaning, try a word before or after both.

Shared associations (8 of 38) — things linked by a property or a setting rather than membership: Things associated with steam (Iron, Sauna, Pressure cooker), Things that are refilled (Prescriptions, Mechanical pencils, Fuel tanks), Things shaped like triangles (Delta, Doritos).

Proper-noun sets (4 of 38) — knowledge rather than reasoning: Actors who have played James Bond, Famous philosophers (Bacon, Locke, Confucius), Restaurant chains (Subway, Domino’s, Jollibee), Fictional characters that are yellow.

Different definitions (2 of 38) — every clue is a meaning of one word: Factory, Inside agent, Tree or shrub → “plant” (#866); Tip, Dot, Main idea → “point” (#879). The clues look unrelated until you read them as definitions.

What did not appear. No puzzle in this window was built on hidden words inside the clues or on sound-alikes, so we make no claims about how those play. The counts are a 38-day sample and are re-counted as the archive grows.

A two-clue method that holds up

Because a wrong guess simply reveals the next clue, Pinpoint rewards guessing well rather than waiting. The routine below is how we read the clues; it is a method, not a statistic:

At clue one, list, don't commit. Write down (mentally is fine) the obvious categories the word belongs to, plus one wordplay reading — what it pairs with. IRON is a metal, an appliance, a golf club, and it goes before “age”; in our archive it opened two different puzzles, one about steam and one about the word “age” (#877 and #862).

At clue two, intersect. Find the category that fits both clues. If the two words share no meaning at all — MAKE and WRONG — the answer is very likely a word partner: in our window 14 of 38 puzzles were, more than any other family. Ask what word goes before or after both.

Guess your best surviving reading at every clue. The Help page describes no way to see the next clue except a wrong guess, so a guess at clue one or two costs nothing you were not going to spend anyway. Make it the reading that fits every clue so far.

Read late clues as strings, not meanings. By clue four, if the meanings still will not cohere, test each clue with a word in front or behind — “Count to” and “Nine times out of” only make sense with a missing word.

What the puzzles look like across a week

LinkedIn's Help page says nothing about difficulty varying by day, so the only evidence is the archive. Splitting our 38 puzzles by weekday shows a tilt: Monday to Thursday carried 8 of the 10 plain sets, while the 11 weekend puzzles had 6 of the 14 word partners, both different-definitions puzzles and no plain set at all. Eleven weekend puzzles is a small sample, so read it as a tendency in these five and a half weeks, not a rule.

The practical use is expectation-setting. On a Saturday or Sunday, if clues one and two share nothing, try the word-partner reading first. On a weekday a plain set was the likeliest single family in our counts — if clue two doesn't settle one, re-list clue one before reaching for wordplay.

A worked puzzle, clue by clue

Pinpoint #856 (3 September 2026) opened with Make. At clue one, list: a brand or manufacturer (a car's make), the verb to create, and — for wordplay — the words it pairs with: make-up, make do, make way. Several readings, no evidence yet.

Clue two was Wrong. Intersect: no meaning of Make overlaps with Wrong — one is a verb, the other an adjective. That is the signature of a word partner, the family behind 14 of our 38 puzzles. What follows both? Make way, wrong way. A guess of “Words that come before ‘way’” fits both clues; submit it now, because if it is wrong the next clue arrives anyway.

Clue three was Right of — a phrase that only makes sense with something after it: right of way. That confirms the partner reading and rules out any meaning-based category, because “right of” has no meaning on its own.

Clue four, Milky, and clue five, Look the other, close it: Milky Way, look the other way. The answer was “Words that come before ‘way’”. The lesson is at clue two: two clues that share no meaning are a strong signal to stop thinking about meaning.

The mistakes that turn a 2 into a 5

These are the habits the method above is designed to stop. They come from how the clues in our archive are built, not from a survey of players.

Anchoring on the first reading. Iron opened two puzzles in our window, once for “age” and once for steam; a player who fixed on the metal would have been wrong both times. Listing several readings at clue one is the fix.

Guessing a member instead of the group. The answers are category names — “Types of rings”, not “wedding ring”. Phrase the guess as a group that contains every clue so far.

Ignoring the missing word. Word partners were the commonest family in our window, and they are invisible if you only read meanings. If the clues still don't cohere by clue three, test a word before or after each one.

Expecting a weekday puzzle at the weekend. In our window the weekend puzzles had no plain sets and leaned on word partners and different-definitions puzzles. If you don't know a proper-noun set, take the later clues — a win on the fifth clue is still a win for your streak.

Pinpoint and your LinkedIn profile

Because Pinpoint sits inside LinkedIn, it has a social layer. The results page offers to share your score, shows the connections leaderboard and, if your company or school is eligible, the company and school leaderboard. LinkedIn's games FAQ is specific about privacy: your score stays private unless you opt into the connections leaderboard or choose to share it, and if you opt in, only connections who have also opted in can see it — which can include recruiters or employers in your network. The Streaks Help page says your streak is private unless you share it.

The official Help page for Pinpoint is worth reading once: it is the source for the rules on this page — the clue-by-clue reveal, the win and loss conditions, and the midnight Pacific expiry. It does not describe how guesses are matched to the answer, so this page doesn't either.

Glossary of Pinpoint terms

Words that come up in discussions of the game, and what they mean here.

• Clue — one of the five words or phrases, revealed one at a time.
• Category — the answer: “the common category or theme” linking the clues, in LinkedIn's wording.
• Reveal — LinkedIn's term for showing the next clue, which happens when a guess is wrong.
• Family — HintSheet's term for the kind of category (word partner, plain set, shared association…). Not LinkedIn's word.
• Solve-in-N — shorthand for winning after N clues.
• Streak — consecutive days won, per LinkedIn's Streaks Help page; private unless you share it.
• Leaderboard — LinkedIn's connections leaderboard ranks you among connections who have opted in; a separate leaderboard ranks the top 50 companies and schools by average score.

Recent Pinpoint answers

Every past puzzle is in the Pinpoint archive. New here? Start with the Pinpoint guide.