What is the answer to the crossword clue "pinnacle"?

There is more than one. 9 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Four squares is ACME or PEAK, and ACME is the more likely because setters prefer it: those four letters are unusually helpful and the word means the highest point and nothing else.

How many letters is the answer to "pinnacle"?

Anything from 3 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.

How reliable are these answers?

6 of the 9 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.

Crossword clue

Pinnacle crossword clue

9 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "pinnacle", from 3 letters up to 11, grouped below by the length of your slot.

Written by Blake Boege

Answers by length

Everything below fits the clue. What separates them is length, running from 3 letters to 11, so find your row and ignore the rest.

Letters	Answers
3	topconfirmed by two sources
4	acmeconfirmed by two sources peakconfirmed by two sources
6	heightconfirmed by two sources summitconfirmed by two sources tiptop
8	meridianconfirmed by two sources
9	elevation
11	superlative

What this list looks like

3 of these are 6 letters, which is more than any other length manages.

At 3 letters you have TOP, and short answers like these turn up far more often than their share of the dictionary suggests.

Which one does the setter mean?

Four squares is ACME or PEAK, and ACME is the more likely because setters prefer it: those four letters are unusually helpful and the word means the highest point and nothing else.

How these differ

A pinnacle is literally a small pointed turret, and every answer here is the figurative sense. ACME, SUMMIT, PEAK and TIPTOP mean the highest point reached, ACME the most abstract and least likely to be a real mountain. HEIGHT and ELEVATION are measurements rather than places. MERIDIAN is the interesting one: it means noon, when the sun is highest, and transferred to any moment of greatest power. SUPERLATIVE is the grammatical form used as a noun for the best of something.

Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have

Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.

Where these answers come from

No puzzle was consulted to build this page. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “pinnacle” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 6 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.

Common questions

What is the answer to the crossword clue "pinnacle"?: There is more than one. 9 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Four squares is ACME or PEAK, and ACME is the more likely because setters prefer it: those four letters are unusually helpful and the word means the highest point and nothing else.
How many letters is the answer to "pinnacle"?: Anything from 3 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
How reliable are these answers?: 6 of the 9 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.