Pinpoint answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (28)

Category shapes, counted

I sorted the 38 answers by the shape of the category. The sorting is my own; the wording of each answer is LinkedIn's, copied as published. Word partners and plain named sets tied for the top spot with 14 each, which together account for nearly three-quarters of the window.

Word partners were the single most reliable shape to learn. Nine were “Words that come before” a hidden word (way, car, age, drop, coffee, source, share, breaker, ten), four were “Words that come after” one (perfect, go, mixed, common), and one asked for places preceded by “Great” (Sandy Desert, Salt Lake, Rift Valley, Barrier Reef, Britain). On these days the first clue is close to meaningless alone. “Make” on 3 September only made sense once “Wrong” and “Right of” joined it in front of “way”.

Named sets were the plain end of the game: parts of the ear, blood types, wind instruments, types of whales, famous philosophers. These reward a quick first-clue guess. Ossicles (#884) points straight at the ear, and A+ (#890) leaves very little doubt.

“Things associated with” and “things that” made up eight days, and they were the vaguest. Trains, music albums and adjustable ceiling lights (#857) only meet at “tracks”; cargo ships, wrestling matches and climbing walls (#873) only meet at “holds”. The two multiple-definition days, “plant” (#866) and “point” (#879), worked the same way from the other direction: five different meanings of one word.

Across the window the first clue was often a word with a well-known second meaning: Pole (#874) opened the demonyms, Bacon (#875) the philosophers, Delta (#876) the triangles, Subway (#881) the restaurant chains, Recorder (#888) the wind instruments, Hamlet (#889) the settlements, Traps (#864) the muscle nicknames, Help (#882) the software menus and Blue (#892) the whales. That is the game's main defence against a guess at clue one. The final clue, by contrast, was often the most famous member of the set: McDonald's (#881), Sean Connery (#887), Wedding (#883).

Two puzzles in the window were near neighbours in topic but not in shape. “Things shaped like triangles” (#876) and “Things associated with steam” (#877) ran on consecutive days and both started with a word that has a second life (Delta, Iron). The answer in each case was the vague “things” shape, which rewards asking what all the clues share physically rather than what set they belong to.

Saturdays belonged to word partners

Laying the 14 word-partner days against the calendar gives the clearest pattern in the window. Five of the six Saturdays were word partners (5, 12 and 19 September, 3 and 10 October); the sixth, 26 September, was the multiple-definition puzzle for “point”, which plays much the same way. Thursdays came next with four of six. Mondays had none.

The hub describes weekends as the time for pop-culture sets and hidden-word constructions. This window's evidence is narrower and more specific: if it is Saturday and the first clue is a short, ordinary word with no obvious set, assume a hidden partner and start testing common words before and after it. By weekday, across 38 puzzles:

The Thursday partners were “way” (3 September), “perfect” (10 September), “go” (17 September) and “breaker” (8 October). The two on Fridays were the “Great” place names (18 September) and “mixed” (25 September). Six weeks is not long enough to call this a rule, and LinkedIn has never said it schedules categories by weekday, but it is a useful default when the first clue gives you nothing to hold on to.

If you want to test the pattern yourself, open the five Saturday partners in a row and try each one from clue one only. The shared skill is the same every time: say the first clue aloud with a common word in front of it and behind it, and see which one sounds like a phrase you have heard.

• Saturday: 5 of 6
• Thursday: 4 of 6
• Friday: 2 of 6
• Tuesday: 1 of 5
• Wednesday: 1 of 5
• Sunday: 1 of 5
• Monday: 0 of 5

Clue five, asides and echoes

The fifth clue is the safety net, and in this window it often came with extra help. In 17 of the 38 puzzles the last clue carried a parenthetical aside that all but named the category: “Sean Connery (first in "Dr. No")”, “Orca (aka “Killer”)”, “Tie (used to avoid a draw)”. If you reach clue five, read the brackets first.

Pinpoint also echoes itself. On 10 September (#863) the category was “Words that come after ‘perfect’” and its first clue was Ten. Exactly a month later (#893) the category was “Words that come before ‘ten’” and Perfect was its second clue. “Iron” opened #862 (Iron Age) and #877 (steam iron). Spotting these echoes is a small but real advantage, and the archive is the only place you can see them side by side.

To practise, cover everything but the first clue on a day page and write down three readings of it — a set it belongs to, a word it pairs with, and a second meaning — before revealing clue two. That is the listing habit the hub recommends, and the archive gives you 38 ready-made reps. Score yourself honestly: a correct guess at clue one or two on a word-partner day is a much stronger result than the same on a named-set day.

Once you can name the shape at clue one, move to the harder test: the eight “things associated with” days. They are the least predictable shape in the window, and the ones where listing several readings matters most.

One more habit worth borrowing from the archive is to read the category wording after you solve, not just the answer. LinkedIn's phrasings are consistent: “Words that come before …”, “Words that come after …”, “Things associated with …”, “Different definitions of …”, “Types of …”, “Parts of …”. Getting used to those frames makes your own guesses closer to the accepted wording, and it shortens the list of shapes you need to test at clue one.

Finally, keep a short list of your own misses. After a few weeks, you will see whether your weak shape is the word partner, the vague “things associated with” day or the named set with a misleading first clue, and you can open those days in the archive to practise exactly that.

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