I suspect the people close to me have noticed that I spend a lot of time looking at license plates. As kids, we would spend our time in the car searching for license plates and then trying to find words that used the letters on the license plate. (of course in the order they appeared on the plate.) So for example, for VCM 620 the first word I think of is ‘vacuum.’
As we got older, we’d get bonus points for things like having the first letter on the plate not be the first letter of the word. We would usually start by trying to get away with something like ‘revacuum’ or even ‘revacuumed’ to also pad the end of the word. But with time it became seen as lame to mindlessly stick a prefix and/or suffix on a word. Eventually we would aspire to have the first and last letters truly embedded. ‘Servicemen’ is a word, right?
I definitely don’t remember every license plate of every car we’ve ever owned, but I do remember quite a few. GEK is an early one I remember. We had an NBA for quite a long time. The first car I bought myself was an SKV. Our current car is an XAD. More than once, I think I’ve weirded out friends by knowing their license plates.
Sadly as the number of cars on the road continues to grow, the arrangements of letters and numbers on plates get more varied and creative. Ontario, for example, use 4 letters and three digits. BC has recently moved to AB1 23C as the format of choice. The headache for the Ontario scheme is making sure no curse words make it on any plates. (Three letter plates obviously have a much shorter list of words to contend with)
My current license plate game is to turn the numbers into a letter that they look like and seeing if the resulting ‘word’ can be pronounced or even better have some sort of meaning. The numbers map to letters as follows:
- 0 -> o (duh)
- 1 -> I or L
- 2 -> Z (tho I’ve recently wondered if it could be an N on its side)
- 3 -> E
- 4 -> A (some people find this to be contrived)
- 5 -> S
- 6 -> G
- 7 -> L
- 8 -> B (tho something W8 could be read as ‘wait’)
- 9 -> G (it looks a bit like a lowercase g, tho looking now, it also looks like a lower case q)
Following these rules, one of my favourite finds is CR8 04K which would be “Crate Oak”