A daily word game built around the license-plate game you played in the back seat on long drives.
Long car trips, a kid in the back seat, and the plate on the car in front. You take the three letters and try to make a word out of them — first letter starts it, last letter ends it, and the one in the middle has to turn up somewhere along the way. It's a game that costs nothing, needs no equipment, and fills fifteen minutes of highway.
Daily Plate is that, with one plate a day for everybody at once. It's free, it takes about five minutes, there's no account to make, and nothing to install. Come back tomorrow and there's a new state and three new letters.
Each day's plate — the state and the three letters — is fixed years in advance and identical for every player in the world. The schedule is pinned rather than generated on the fly, which means that when the dictionary changes (and it changes most weeks) the answers to a given day can grow, but the puzzle never shifts under someone mid-game.
Letters aren't drawn uniformly. They're weighted toward the frequencies of real English, and every candidate plate is tested against the dictionary before it's allowed onto the calendar: a plate has to hide at least eight findable words, and no more than about forty, so days feel roughly consistent. No plate ever ends in S — otherwise every answer could be another word with an S stapled on.
Answers come from a curated list of roughly 10,400 words, three to eight letters long. It started from Google's public-domain English frequency list and has been hand-edited ever since: proper nouns, brand names, place names, abbreviations, web jargon and slang taken out; whole families of ordinary English put back in as gaps turned up — agent nouns, past tenses, superlatives, animals, adjectives ending in -ish.
A second list of about 1,600 longer words powers bonus scoring. Those count for points but never toward the daily total.
The list is the part of this game most likely to be wrong on any given day, and player reports are how it improves. Several hundred words have been added because somebody wrote in to say "trolley should have counted."
Nine times out of ten, the middle letter isn't in the interior of the word — it's doing double duty as the first or last letter. The other time, it's a genuine gap in the dictionary. Send it over and it'll probably be in by next week.
Yes. The puzzle changes at midnight in your own timezone, so a player in Tokyo starts the same plate several hours before a player in Denver, but it's the same three letters and the same state.
No, and there isn't one. Streaks and daily progress live in your browser's local storage. That means no signup and no email, but also no syncing between devices — your phone and your laptop keep separate streaks, and clearing your browser data resets things.
Because no plate ever ends in S. If S-ending plates existed, the optimal strategy on those days would be to think of a word and add an S, which isn't a puzzle. Removing them entirely made every other day better.
Not a native one. The site works offline once you've loaded it, and on a phone you can add it to your home screen — it opens full-screen like an app. On iPhone: Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android: menu, then Install app.
No — all artwork is original. See the plates for what each design depicts and why none of them copy a real one.
One person, in Colorado, which is why the first plate ever built was a Colorado plate. Bug reports, missing words and complaints all go to hello@dailyplate.org and are read by an actual human.