License Plate Ideas
| Material | Status |
|---|---|
| Idea words | Editorial examples |
| 2007 survey and historical refusal examples | 1 source · vanity-plate overview |
People searching for plate ideas want a starting word, then a way to see it on a blank. Each idea link opens its text in the plate preview. Availability is a DMV question, collected on the official-link page.
Names
Jobs
Hobbies
Number puns
What the survey actually measured
The vanity-plate article cites a 2007 AAMVA survey of about 9.7 million personalized plates in the United States. Penetration, not cleverness, is what it ranks: Virginia 16.19%, New Hampshire 13.99%, Illinois 13.41%, Nevada 12.73%, Montana 9.8%, Texas 0.5%. Canada’s highest share in that write-up is Ontario at 4.59%. Those are old counts. I am not updating them with a guess.
States keep refusal lists. The same article mentions Florida refusing PIMPALA, New York refusing FDNY, NYPD, and GOD, and Georgia refusing covfefe. Germany’s article-level note in that page bars SS, SA, and HJ. I repeat those as historical refusals, not as a complete ban file.
Shorter character budgets have their own page: 7-letter ideas. Jokes that might get a clerk’s no are on funny ideas.
Questions
Are these real issued plates?
No. The words are editorial examples. The survey figures and the banned-message stories are the sourced facts, and they are labeled separately.
Which states personalize the most?
A 2007 AAMVA survey cited on the vanity-plate page ranked Virginia 16.19%, New Hampshire 13.99%, Illinois 13.41%, Nevada 12.73%, and Montana 9.8%. Texas was 0.5% in that survey. Ontario led Canada at 4.59%.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Vanity plate — 2026-11-09