license plate
124
1.6
- noun
- /ˈlaɪsəns pleɪt/
- US
:
matrícula
- Did you see the license plate?
- license plate number
- license plate on a car
- license plate on an automobile
You saw his license plate, you saw his car.
- You saw his license plate, you saw his car.
- Oh, this guy in this car with this license plate.
- What is more like the DMV selling vanity license plates?
- What do you mean it needs a license plate?
- But then others are, you know, like, wow, we got a car and it has the license plate says for MPG.
- Like why do you feel it's so necessary to grandstand on your license plate?
- And so they said, oh, we really like the personal license plate.
- And then when they find his car, the license plates of these cars with him, he'll, they'll be able to find him.
- And then I noticed from this new vantage point, I can see the license plate on the car and it says Doctor Noodle.
- And then he was like, yeah, I was worried that there was trafficking going on because the license plate was like out of out of state or something.
Examples
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I know they saw my license plate.
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You saw his license plate, you saw his car.
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Did you drive your own car with your own license plate?
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I wrote down the license plate number.
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Do you remember the license plate or the color of the car? - I remember the color.
-
You know, at some gas stations, they write down the license plate number.
Fiction book (1990) -
In the parking lot one afternoon, Suskind counted license plates from eighteen states.
Fiction book (1998) -
As in Tepehuanes, a significant number of vehicles we spotted bore U.S. license plates.
Academic text (2002) -
Good thing I caught his license plate on one of my many trusty dash cams.
-
The police officer took down the license plate number of the suspicious vehicle.
Synonyms
296
3.4
A flat thin piece of material like metal or bone
A flat plate on a car or other vehicle that shows its registration number
A number on a car's license plate that identifies the vehicle
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a simple attributive noun construction where 'license' modifies 'plate' to mean a plate that displays licensing/registration information; a learner who knows 'license' (official permission/registration) and 'plate' (a flat panel) can readily infer this. The pattern (noun+noun = object associated with X) is cross-linguistically common, so the composed meaning is immediately transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
License plate may come from early cars that carried a metal plate showing an official license number. That's why the phrase now means the small metal 'registration' plate on a car that shows its number.