pinpoint
Americanverb
noun
-
an insignificant or trifling thing
-
the point of a pin
-
(modifier) exact
a pinpoint aim
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
pinpointsimple
-
pinpointssimple
-
have pinpointedperfect
-
has pinpointedperfect
-
am pinpointingprogressive
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are pinpointingprogressive
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is pinpointingprogressive
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have been pinpointingperfect progressive
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has been pinpointingperfect progressive
Past
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pinpointedsimple
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had pinpointedperfect
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was pinpointingprogressive
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were pinpointingprogressive
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had been pinpointingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of pinpoint
Explanation
To pinpoint something is to nail down its exact location. The point of a pin is very small and fine. Similarly, when you pinpoint something, you have narrowed down its location to the smallest possibility: you've found out exactly where it is. The government is constantly trying to pinpoint the location of terrorists, just as police try to pinpoint the location of criminals. Dogs can pinpoint many things through smell. It's often hard to pinpoint which car is producing an annoying car alarm. When you pinpoint something, you've found it.
Vocabulary lists containing pinpoint
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
His pinpoint pass picked out Kai Havertz for the opening goal.
From BBC ● Aug. 21, 2026
What makes things even more difficult is that it’s impossible, as of now, to pinpoint the exact time and location of a downpour, even though it can be gauged with marvelous accuracy.
From Slate ● Aug. 21, 2026
Scientists have yet to pinpoint a definitive cause for the rise in rates.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 10, 2026
By identifying areas where the waves moved at lower velocities, the researchers were able to pinpoint the likely location of magma.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 5, 2026
Still, even in the mounting darkness, I was able to pinpoint where I was and where I needed to go.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
They combined single-cell sequencing, which identifies which receptors each neuron expresses, with spatial transcriptomics, which pinpoints where those neurons are located.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 30, 2026
The composition is utterly still, devoid of human presence and enlivened only by fluttering harbor flags and the canvas’s scintillating pinpoints of color.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 28, 2026
To repeat, possible Japanese intervention would reverse the flow of liquidity into global markets that Edwards pinpoints.
From Barron's ● Nov. 22, 2025
The exact coordinates of this backwater are a bit hazy, but Storyteller 2 helpfully pinpoints the locale as “a place where being from somewhere is who you are.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 22, 2025
Stars are so far away that they appear to us to be just pinpoints of light.
From "A Brief History of Time: And Other Essays" by Stephen Hawking
He was initially tested for Lyme, and it wasn’t until a monthslong antibody study that the Bourbon virus—so far found in only a handful of cases nationwide—was finally pinpointed as the culprit.
From Slate ● Aug. 6, 2026
Authorities said they hadn’t yet pinpointed a cause for the Dove fire, which burned in the hills southwest of Sonora — a town outside of Yosemite National Park in southern Tuolumne County.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 27, 2026
The firm previously said that US authorities had not pinpointed specific concerns about its technology even as it ordered both platforms to be suspended around the world.
From BBC ● Jul. 1, 2026
Using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, Juno's onboard camera, and even images captured by amateur astronomers, the team pinpointed the locations of several unusual storms Wong called "stealth" superstorms.
From Science Daily ● May 21, 2026
Morgan’s work had pinpointed their location on chromosomes, where they were supposedly strung like beads on a wire.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The genomic evidence has been critical in pinpointing the reservoir of the plague in Central Asia and in tracing its lightning-fast diffusion along trade routes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 2026
FactSet is pinpointing $59.5 billion, at the midpoint of that range.
From Barron's ● Apr. 2, 2026
In the meantime, she said, the startup plans to grow — “slowly ... so that every author’s needs are taken care of” — and keep pinpointing publishing “blind spots.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 18, 2026
By pinpointing an issue where electric charge slightly spreads to neighboring pixels -- a phenomenon called the brighter-fatter effect -- the team designed algorithms that digitally corrected the images, fully restoring AMI's performance.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 27, 2025
Not that pinpointing another Book Scavenger user was an easy thing to deduce, even in the smallest and quietest of schools.
From "Book Scavenger" by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
