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.
Daily Plate knows about 105,000 English words, but only some of them make up the day's target list. This is the one rule that surprises people, so it's worth being clear about.
So on a T·E·T plate, ticket and tempest are plate words, while tercet and teleost come in as bonuses. Both are real, both score; one is the kind of word most people would find, the other is a flex.
If every valid English word counted toward the target, some plates would hide two hundred answers and clearing one would be impossible — the number would stop meaning anything. If the game only accepted everyday words, it would keep telling people that perfectly real words are wrong, which is the most annoying thing a word game can do.
Splitting the two fixes both problems. The target stays small enough to chase; the dictionary stays big enough to respect what you know. The only thing the game should ever reject is something that isn't a word at all.
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.
What the game accepts comes from ENABLE, the open dictionary used by most serious word games — about 105,000 words once we filter it to what could fit a plate — plus modern vocabulary ENABLE is too old to include (it dates from 1997, so email, online and podcast had to be added).
What counts toward the plate is a smaller list of roughly 10,600 everyday words: frequency-ranked common English, cross-checked against ENABLE so nothing fake gets in, plus all the regular forms of those words — walk, walked, walking, walker.
Proper nouns, brand names and abbreviations are excluded from both. 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 real word gets rejected outright, that's a bug rather than a rule you're missing. Tell us and it gets added.
Play today's plate