One license plate a day. Three letters. Find every word hiding between them.
Daily Plate takes the old road-trip habit of making words out of the license plate in front of you and turns it into a daily puzzle. Everyone in the world gets the same plate on the same day, and the plate changes at midnight your local time.
Every plate shows three letters. Take today's plate as an example:
So on an A·O·D plate, around works: it starts with A, ends with D, and has an O in the middle. abroad works. asteroid works.
But award does not work — it starts with A and ends with D, but there is no O anywhere in it. And ago does not work either, because it doesn't end in D. Both are the classic near-misses.
A word like echo on an E·O·O plate would fail, because its only O is the final letter — that O is already doing the job of the last letter. The middle letter needs its own home somewhere in the interior of the word. If you're staring at a word that seems obviously right and the game rejects it, this is almost always why.
Longer words are worth more. The base value of a word is its length minus two:
| Word length | Example | Base points |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | aid | 1 |
| 4 | avid | 2 |
| 5 | aloud | 3 |
| 6 | around | 4 |
| 7 | android | 5 |
| 8 | asteroid | 6 |
Correct guesses in a row build a combo. The multiplier climbs by half a step for each consecutive hit and caps at ×5:
| Words in a row | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| 1 | ×1 |
| 2 | ×1.5 |
| 3 | ×2 |
| 5 | ×3 |
| 9 or more | ×5 (max) |
A wrong guess resets the combo to zero. So does taking a hint. This is the central tension of the game: a wild guess costs you nothing but the streak you've been building, and on a long combo that streak is worth more than the word you're guessing at.
Practical consequence: when you're deep in a combo, only submit words you're confident about. Save the speculative guesses for right after a reset, when you have nothing to lose.
Every plate shows a par — a target that most players can reach. Par scales with how many words the plate hides, and it's capped at 14 so that even a very rich plate stays achievable in one sitting. Beating par is the everyday goal; clearing the entire plate is rare and gets you confetti.
The main word list only includes words up to eight letters. But if you find something longer that fits the plate — accommodated, acknowledged — it still counts as a bonus word. Bonus words score points and extend your combo, but they don't count toward clearing the plate. They show up as gold pills with a star.
This exists because long words are the most satisfying finds, and it seemed wrong to reject them just because they'd make the daily target unreasonable.
Stuck? The hint button locks onto one unfound word and peels it open one letter at a time.
Press I'm Done whenever you like. You'll get a results screen with your score, how you did against par, your last seven days, and a countdown to tomorrow's plate — including which state you'll be in.
Ending isn't final. The plate stays open until midnight, so you can walk away, think about it over lunch, and come back. Only when you press Reveal missed words does the day close for good and the answers appear.
Playing on consecutive days builds a day streak. It's stored in your browser, not on a server, so it lives on the device you play on — and clearing your browser data will reset it. There's no account and no signup, which is the tradeoff: nothing to manage, but nothing to sync either.
Answers are drawn from a curated list of about 10,400 common English words, built on Google's public-domain frequency list and hand-edited continuously — usually because a player told us something was missing. Proper nouns, brand names, abbreviations and web jargon are excluded. Plurals ending in S are excluded too, because no plate ever ends in S; that rule exists so "just add an S" can never be an answer.
If a word you're sure about gets rejected, it's probably a genuine gap rather than a rule you're missing. Tell us and it usually gets added the same week.
Play today's plate