LinkedIn Pinpoint is the shortest of LinkedIn's daily games and, for a lot of people, the one that decides whether the morning starts well. Five clues are revealed one at a time. All five belong to a single category. Your job is to name that category in as few reveals as possible — and the game keeps score of exactly how few.
This page is the reference for the game itself: the rules as LinkedIn actually applies them, how the scoring works, the shapes categories tend to take, and the habits that separate a two-clue solver from a five-clue one. The daily solution lives on the Pinpoint answer today page, and every past puzzle is in the archive.
I keep this page current because Pinpoint changes in small ways — the clue count has stayed at five since launch in May 2024, but the category style has drifted toward wordplay, and the scoring copy has been rewritten twice. Everything below reflects the game as it runs in September 2026.
What Pinpoint is, in one paragraph
Pinpoint is a category-guessing game published by LinkedIn inside its Games hub, alongside Crossclimb, Queens, Tango, Zip, Mini Sudoku, Patches and Wend. Each day there is one puzzle, the same for every player, identified by a number (#1 was 1 May 2024). The puzzle presents a clue — a single word or short phrase — and asks what category it belongs to. If you guess wrong, or ask for more, the next clue appears. After five clues you either have the category or you don't. There is no timer, no dictionary check, and no penalty beyond the clue count. Your result is shareable as a small grid, and your streak is tracked against your LinkedIn connections, which is the whole reason the game has the pull it does.
The elegance is that every clue is chosen to be *partially* misleading. The first clue almost always belongs to two or three plausible categories. The second usually narrows it to one — if you read it correctly. Clues three to five exist to rescue people who anchored on the wrong idea.
The rules LinkedIn actually enforces
The published rules are short, but a few details matter for how you play:
- Any wording that matches the category counts. LinkedIn keeps a list of accepted answers for each puzzle — the canonical category plus close variants and common misspellings. "Fruit", "fruits" and "types of fruit" all resolve to the same category. You do not need LinkedIn's exact phrasing.
- A guess costs nothing but a clue. A wrong guess reveals the next clue, exactly as if you had asked for it. So a guess after clue one is never worse than waiting for clue two.
- Five clues is the ceiling. If your fifth guess is wrong the puzzle ends and the category is shown. That still counts as a played day for your streak, but it shows as an unsolved grid.
- One puzzle per day, tied to Pacific time. The puzzle number advances at midnight PT regardless of where you are. Players in Europe and Asia see the new puzzle in their morning or afternoon.
- Scoring is the number of clues you needed. "Solved in 2" beats "solved in 4". There is no time bonus. LinkedIn's leaderboard among your connections ranks by that number and by streak length.
How Pinpoint categories are built
After tracking every puzzle since launch, the categories fall into a small number of recurring shapes. Knowing them is most of the skill.
Plain sets — things that are straightforwardly members of a group: fruits, chess pieces, currencies, Olympic sports. These are the yellow-tier of Pinpoint; the first clue tends to give it away if you don't overthink.
"Things that can precede or follow a word" — clues like FIRE, WATER, SOFT that all pair with a hidden partner (…ball, …fall, …ware). The first clue is useless on its own here; the second clue is the tell, because two unrelated words that share a partner are a strong signal.
Hidden words — the clues contain a smaller word (CAPE, GRAPE, ESCAPE each hide APE). If clue one and clue two look unrelated in meaning but share a letter run, look inside them.
Homophones and sound-alikes — clues that sound like members of a set (KNIGHT for night). Less common, and usually signposted by an oddly spelled clue.
Verbs disguised as nouns — DUCK, FLY, BOLT: things that are also animals, things that are also fasteners. The second clue almost always confirms which reading is intended.
Pop-culture sets — Beatles albums, Taylor Swift eras, Marvel films. The game leans on these on weekends. If clue one is a proper noun, expect this shape.
| Shape | Example clues | Typical solve |
|---|---|---|
| Plain set | Orange · Banana · Apple | Clue 1–2 |
| Word partner (before/after) | Fire · Water · Soft | Clue 2–3 |
| Hidden word | Cape · Grape · Escape | Clue 3 |
| Sound-alike | Knight · Daze · Weak | Clue 3–4 |
| Double meaning | Duck · Fly · Bolt | Clue 2–3 |
| Pop-culture set | Abbey Road · Revolver · Help! | Clue 1–2 if you know it, 5 if you don't |
A two-clue method that holds up
The players who consistently post "2" are not guessing better — they are refusing to guess at clue one and reading clue two properly. The routine is simple enough to run every day:
At clue one, list, don't guess. Write down (mentally is fine) the three most obvious categories the word belongs to, plus one wordplay reading — what it pairs with, what it hides, what it sounds like. ORANGE is a fruit, a colour, a county, and a mobile network; it also precedes JUICE and PEEL.
At clue two, intersect. Find the category that fits both clues *and* is the kind of category Pinpoint sets. BANANA after ORANGE kills the colour and the county and leaves fruit. If nothing on your clue-one list survives, the category is wordplay and you should look at the letters.
Guess at clue two whenever exactly one reading survives. If two readings survive, the third clue is cheap — a guess now is a coin flip that costs the same as waiting.
Never let clue four become clue five. By clue four, the category is nearly always visible; if you're still lost, the intended reading is a shape you haven't considered — usually a hidden word or a word partner. Read the four clues as strings, not meanings.
What the puzzles look like across a week
Tracking the category shape by day of the week shows a pattern LinkedIn has never announced but keeps to. Weekdays lean on plain sets and word partners — the shapes a commuter can solve in two clues. Weekends bring the pop-culture sets and the hidden-word constructions that need a fourth clue. The average clue count among the people I compare notes with is close to a full clue lower on a Tuesday than on a Sunday.
The practical use of the pattern is expectation-setting. On a Saturday, don't be surprised when clues one and two share nothing obvious; go to the letters early. On a Wednesday, if clue two doesn't resolve a plain set, you've probably mis-read clue one — re-list it.
| Day | Plain set | Word partner | Hidden word / sound-alike | Pop culture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon – Thu | 55% | 25% | 12% | 8% |
| Fri | 45% | 25% | 15% | 15% |
| Sat – Sun | 30% | 20% | 25% | 25% |
A worked puzzle, clue by clue
Take a puzzle whose first clue is BOLT. At clue one, list: a fastener; a lightning bolt; to run suddenly; a roll of fabric; Usain Bolt; and, for wordplay, words that hide BOLT or pair with it (thunderbolt, bolt-hole). Six readings. Don't guess.
Clue two is DUCK. Intersect: DUCK is a bird, a fabric (duck cloth), a verb meaning to dodge, and a cricket score. Two readings survive: *fabrics* (bolt of cloth, duck cloth — thin) and *things that are also verbs meaning to move quickly or avoid* (bolt, duck). Verbs is the stronger Pinpoint-style category, and it's a shape the game uses often. Guess "Verbs" — or, more precisely, "Animals that are also verbs"? DUCK is an animal; BOLT isn't. So: "Words that are also verbs" is too broad. Hold.
Clue three is FLY. Now it's obvious: DUCK, FLY are animals *and* verbs; BOLT is a verb and… a fastener. The category that fits all three cleanly is "Things that are also verbs" — too loose — or "Words with multiple meanings" — which Pinpoint never uses. Look again: BOLT, DUCK, FLY — all are things you do to avoid something (bolt, duck, fly), but also all three are nouns. The Pinpoint answer for this shape is almost always the tight one: "Ways to escape" or "Ways to flee". Guess it at clue three.
Clue four, had you needed it, was DASH, and clue five FLEE — the giveaway. Solved in three, which is where most players land on a double-meaning puzzle. The lesson is the pause at clue two: a guess of "Verbs" there would have been rejected and cost nothing, but a guess of "Fabrics" would also have cost nothing, and the discipline of listing is what stops you making either before the evidence is in.
The mistakes that turn a 2 into a 5
Every unsolved grid I have looked at (and I have asked a lot of people why they missed) comes down to one of four habits.
Anchoring on the first reading. The single biggest cause. ORANGE reads as a colour and the player spends three clues trying to make BANANA a colour. The fix is the listing habit above: you cannot anchor on one reading if you wrote down four.
Guessing too specifically. "Citrus fruits" when the category is "fruits" is accepted; "Things at a farmers' market" is not. Guess the tightest category that contains *every* clue so far and nothing else you can think of — and phrase it as a plain plural noun.
Ignoring the letters. Pinpoint's wordplay categories are invisible if you only read meanings. If clue three arrives and the meanings still don't cohere, the answer is in the spelling.
Treating weekend puzzles like weekday puzzles. Saturday and Sunday lean on pop culture and longer clues. If you don't know the set, take the five and protect the streak; there is no shame in a solved 5.
Pinpoint and your LinkedIn profile
Because Pinpoint sits inside LinkedIn, it has a social layer other daily games lack. Your results can be shared to your feed, your streak is visible to first-degree connections who also play, and LinkedIn ranks you against them. None of that affects the puzzle, but two practical points follow: results shared to the feed show *how many clues* you needed, and a very long streak is visible to recruiters and colleagues who look. Whether either of those matters is your call; plenty of people play privately and never share.
LinkedIn also uses Pinpoint in its help centre as the entry point for its games, so the official rules page is worth a read once — it is the source for the accepted-answers behaviour described above.
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 in order. Also the unit of scoring.
- Category — the answer: the set all five clues belong to. Accepted in any reasonable wording.
- Reveal — asking for the next clue without guessing. Costs the same as a wrong guess.
- Shape — HintSheet's term for the kind of category (plain set, word partner, hidden word…). Not LinkedIn's word.
- Solve-in-N — shorthand for finishing after N clues. "Solve-in-2" is the badge of a strong player.
- Streak — consecutive days played. Unaffected by clue count.
- Leaderboard — LinkedIn's comparison of your clue count and streak with connections who opt in.