The License Plate game

I've come up with a new game for all you lexiphiles.

In years past, I've found a need to recognize cars by their license plate. Since strings of letters are especially difficult to remember, I've taken to assigning a word to each license plate as a sort of mnemonic device. For example, MNG becomes mango, RST becomes wrist, and ILR becomes pillar. They don't always sound the same, but the key point is that each letter in the license plate is present in the correct order in the associated mnemonic word.

Originally I only used such devices to recognize my family's cars, but on a recent trip to Salt Lake, I began extending it to a more general scope. I was trying to trace the flow of traffic between the various lanes, so I'd pick a certain car and assign it a mnemonic name. Then, if I saw that car again, I could assume that his lane was going at least as fast as mine.

Coming up with the words was interesting, so before long, my goal was to "name" as many cars as possible on the trip. That's the game. Obviously some are more difficult than others, so it becomes a competition with my traveling companions to mnemonicize each car first. I don't have a scoring structure set up yet, but I'm not sure it needs it. Simply coming up with the words is fun in and of itself.

Enjoy!

As a side note, occasionally I'll run across an exceptionally difficult one, so on Wednesday I finished up a program which searches a dictionary of 293,000 words for me. I'd offer to e-mail it to anyone who's interested, but it only works on OS X and gMail hasn't been cooperating when I've tried to send it previously. Sorry.