Pinpoint hints and how to read them

Pinpoint gives you five clues and one hidden category. A good hint never names the category. It shows you which way to look. This guide explains how the clues work, how to read them, and how to take one hint without seeing the answer. Every example is a finished puzzle.

How Pinpoint works

LinkedIn’s Help Center describes Pinpoint as a word association game: you guess the common category or theme that links a set of words, and you are given five clues. The steps are short:

• Press Start game and the first clue appears.
• Type your guess in the “Guess the category” box and press Enter.
• A wrong guess reveals the next clue.
• The aim is to find the category with as few clue reveals as possible.
• If you use all five clues without a correct guess, you lose and the answer is shown.

A new puzzle comes out every day at midnight Pacific Time. Yesterday’s puzzle stops being playable at that moment.

Read the clues one at a time

Do not commit after clue 1. One word fits many categories. Pinpoint #910 opens with “Port”, which could be a harbor or a wine. Clue 2 is “Shiraz”, and the wine reading wins. Merlot, Chardonnay and Pinot noir follow, and the category is “Types of wine”.

Name what the clues share, then make it narrower. Pinpoint #909 gives Pewter, Solder and Brass. “Metals” fits after three clues. Bronze and Stainless steel keep fitting, but the category on the page is narrower: “Metal alloys”. Every clue is a mix of a base metal with other elements. When your guess fits every clue but still feels loose, ask what extra thing the clues have in common.

If the words look unrelated, look for a missing word. Try the word in front of each clue and after each clue.

• Pinpoint #912 starts with Jet, Gulf and Blood. Add “stream” after each: jet stream, Gulf Stream, bloodstream. The category is “Words that come before “stream””.
• Pinpoint #919 is the other direction: Cold, Age, Mason, Henge. Put “stone” in front: stone cold, Stone Age, stonemason, Stonehenge. The category is “Terms that come after “stone””.
• Pinpoint #915 is Hard, Digital, Advance, Backup, and the missing word is “copy”.

Use the last clue as the strongest nudge. In 9 of the 12 past puzzles on this site (#909 to #920), the fifth clue carries a short note in brackets. In #915 the fifth clue reads “Carbon (the second c of cc)”, which points straight at copy. In #918 it is “Ahab (from Moby-Dick)”, which points to characters from fiction.

Three more past puzzles, clue by clue

Here are three finished puzzles, with the clues in the order recorded.

Pinpoint #911, Oct 28. Grate, Damper, Mantel, Hearth, “Chimney (to vent the smoke)”. The first clue is a trap: a grate is also something you do to cheese. Damper could be a wet blanket, and a mantel is a shelf. Put them next to Hearth and the picture is a living room with a fire. The category is “Parts of a fireplace”. Words with a second meaning get narrower once two of them agree. Mantel and Hearth, the third and fourth clues, are where it tips.

Pinpoint #918, Nov 4. Haddock, Sparrow, Hook, Nemo, “Ahab (from Moby-Dick)”. Read alone, these are a fish, a bird, a tool and a clownfish. Read together, they are names, and the bracket on the last clue says where one of them comes from: a novel. The category is “Fictional sea captains”, and no clue contains the word “captain”. When a list of ordinary nouns includes a capitalized name, ask whether they are all characters.

Pinpoint #920, Nov 6. Argument, Street, Vinyl record, Sheet of paper, “Coin (heads and tails)”. Nothing links an argument to a street in meaning. The link is a shared property: each has two sides. The category is “Things that have two sides”. The bracket on the last clue, “heads and tails”, does most of the work. If the first three clues refuse to form a topic, expect a property and not a setting.

The order the clues appear in

The game shows one clue at a time, and a wrong guess opens the next one, so the order is part of how you play. Two caveats about our own pages. The clue order we show for #909 to #918 comes from a public record of those days, not from our own capture of the live game, so we call it the order recorded and not the order you saw. And LinkedIn’s Help Center does not describe how the order is chosen.

What the records show is a loose pattern. Across the 112 puzzles from July 17 to November 6 in the public linkedin-games-archive, 98 open with a single word, and 44 have a bracketed note on the fifth clue. Notes can show up earlier too, as in “Live (on Twitch)”, the fourth clue of #912. Some first clues are hard to guess from, such as Wings in #913, Jet in #912 and Body in #916. Others are not: #917 opens with Taiga, a precise term, and the other four are as precise.

So treat clue 1 as a pointer and not a conclusion. Make a guess after clue 2 or 3 only if two clues agree on something narrower than the first, and spend the fourth and fifth clues on checking. The Help Center says to aim for as few clue reveals as possible, so a guess you are unsure of costs you a clue.

Know the common shapes

Across #909 to #920 the answers fall into a few shapes:

• Three are a missing word that goes before or after each clue: “stream” in #912, “copy” in #915, “stone” in #919.
• Three are “Parts of” something: a fireplace in #911, a theatre in #913, a letter or email in #916.
• Two are “Types of” something: wine in #910 and biome in #917.
• Four are something else: Metal alloys in #909, Things with spines in #914, Fictional sea captains in #918, and Things that have two sides in #920.

Each shape suggests a question to ask. For a missing word, ask what fits in front or behind all five. For “Parts of”, ask where you would find all of these together. For “Types of”, ask what group these are members of. For the rest, ask what property they share. #920 is the last kind: an argument, a street, a vinyl record and a sheet of paper all have two sides.

How a hint works on this page

Each puzzle page on this site has a hint button and a separate answer button. Both stay covered until you tap them, and scrolling never opens either one. The hint is a single sentence, written to help without naming the answer.

When the answer is a missing word, the hint usually tells you which side it goes on and how long it is. All three missing-word puzzles from #909 to #920 do:

• #912: “A six-letter word placed after each clue fits all five, and it describes something that flows, like water, wind or video.”
• #915: “Think of a four-letter word that follows each clue, something you might make of a document or a file.”
• #919: “One five-letter word fits in front of every clue — something hard you could pick up off the ground.”

When the answer is a topic, the hint describes the setting. The hint for #911 reads “Picture the spot where a log fire burns in a living room, and think about the pieces that frame it or carry its smoke away.”

Take exactly one hint

1. Play in LinkedIn first. Read the clue, guess, and let a wrong guess open the next one.
2. When you are stuck, open the hint on the puzzle page and leave the answer closed.
3. Guess again. If you are still stuck, go back to the game and make another guess; a wrong one opens the next clue.

Today’s hint is on the home page. Earlier puzzles, with their hints and answers, are in the Pinpoint archive. This site is not affiliated with LinkedIn, and you cannot play the game here. We only show hints and answers. How the pages are made and checked is on the method page.