Today I am doing science. Largely, this is inspired by the blog Experimental History. You can’t read impassioned pleas to do science, small science on your own every two weeks1 without catching a little of the small science fever. Thanks, Adam.
Whenever I’m out and about, I see cars. This is largely because I live in America2.
But the cars I see have these big ol’ license plates on ‘em, and I can’t help but try to make ‘em into words. Sometimes people pay extra to get specific letters. Usually, those are clear! A woman in my hometown had SATAN on her red convertible. Okay! I once saw a suburban with the plates DBLWNGR and spent the next few minutes trying to figure out what a double winger was, or if — perhaps — they had meant to suggest, like the proverbial dog, a double wanger. Unsolved mysteries of the world.
But one mystery lurked deeper than the others: would everyone read these license plate abbreviations the same? SATAN is pretty unambiguous, but what about something like HND? Surely everyone would read that as HAND, right? Or maybe some would instead read “HOUND”? It’s possible, but A is shorter, with a less complex vowel sound.3.
So I decided to find out. I asked 111 people45 to look at 23 two or three letter abbreviations and make words out of them6.
Takeaways
The big takeaways:
- People generally pick single syllable words (as expected!)
- If there’s no single syllable word, half of people will converge ona two syllable, the other half will diverge radically
- TRD spells turd and toyota sells ‘em anyway
Survey Results
Here’s what I found. I’ll link to the full results at the end, so you can do your own analysis. Note: I’m presenting these in alphabetical order, though this is not the order they were asked in.
ASM
I wanted to see what a non-obvious or nonsense answer would yield. This appeared late in the results.
Wide variety of answers here (35 unique from 50 total), with the most common convergence being “assume”, a complex word. There’s a handful of variations on asim (asem, asam assem, and so on), with two people choosing assembly, a rather complex word!
BLD
To me this was unequivocally blood, but I was curious if I’d get anyone saying ballad (no one did). I wonder if I might have seen ballad if I’d put it after RNW, which had a strong reading of renew.
Other people disagreed, with the most common result being bold (15 / 54), followed by 13 bleeds. build followed closely after.
BND
To me this is Bond, but I expected a smattering of band and bind. I did not consider bend or binned. Most curious to me is the person who picked blind, inserting a consonant.
17/54 chose bind, 12 chose band, 8 choose bend, 7 chose bond.
CLN
To me (and most people, at 29/54) this is clean, though I mostly put this in to see if we’d get any clown (4) or colon (3). Other answers include clone (5) and clan (6).
CRD
This is curd to me, but most people see crowd (10/53), card (10/53), or crud (9/53). Only 3 other people picked curd.
CRN
My instinct is kern (based on how I’d pronounce it), but there’s a lot (20/53) of corn here. I apologize to my Iowa roots for not seeing it myself. 5 chose Crown, 2 chose crayon(!), 3 people chose Crying, and a handful chose either kern or CERN (hard to differentiate), but we have at least 3 hard Cs, at least 3 soft Cs, and 4 that didn’t specify.
CT
I read this as cut, but I expected a load of cat. This was the first question asked, and I wanted to lead with something nice and simple. Cat was the most popular answer at first, but it was overtaken by cut (16/54). This is interesting, as in general we don’t get a lot of U sounds.
We also got some long vowels here, with cute and cutie pulling in a vote each, and a complex ou with court. I did forget about Connecticut, which has an abbreviation of CT, so that’s on me. I’m not from that part of the US!
Also of note here are the soft C sounds (Seat, Seaty, City, and so one).
And one person just wrote “CT”, which… Okay.
FDN
This was another where I didn’t have an obvious answer in mind, but wanted to see if I could lure out a complex word. I see foundation, and I’m not alone, with 11/52 making it the plurality. BUT we saw 30 unique answers here, one of the biggest spreads of the questionnaire. I did expect some FDNY associations, and got 2. The next most popular answer was Federation at 6.
FRD
I read this as ferd, but realize I may have primed people for Ford by talking about license plates in the survey intro. I am not experienced at this!7.
18/53 picked Ford, with 10 picking Fred. 3 optimists saw freed.
FRG
I thought this was unambiguously FROG, and most people (40/54) agreed. Actually, if I’d normalized further, that would have been 44/54. The next most common was Frag with 6, and one with fragment, in a rare case of adding on to the end.
MHN
This was another I put in to see what people would do when it isn’t clear. One person wrote M’H’N, which isn’t helpful!
I read this as mountain (inexplicably, but not uniquely), or mohan, which only one other person entered. Common results include Manhattan (9 – is that a common abbreviation?) and moan (6)
MLT
I see melt (25/54) but was curious to see any malts (8). The interesting ones here are the people who expand it to maltese, military (3), Milton (2). We also got a handful of milt, molt, and mallet, as well as two people who gave Mutton Lettuce and Tomato, which I had not considered.
One person gave a regional abbreviation, which I also forgot to consider (also, hello neighbor!).
MTL
Most people (29/52) said Metal, with one mountain lion, and 3 Montreal, as apparently it’s their NHL abbreviation.
MTN
Our smallest spread, aside from FRG. I expected mountain, and that’s what I got (50/54). One maintain(!), and one meatin’, which I assume is a joke.
PLW
Thank you to Pacific Lorthwest. I expected plow, which delivered at 41/52, but we got some more complex words, including pillow (6).
PRD
I’m torn between perd and prod here, but the most common is actually proud, a nice round vowel at 24/54. Unexpected! Prod is next at 16, followed by pride at 6.
RDS
I see Reds here, but that’s not the consensus. Lots of Reads, many Roads (15/54), a smattering of reds, rods, and raids.
RDY
Almost everyone reads this as ready (37/54), with some rudys, and a couple more complex: ruddy (2), rowdy (2), and one redeem(!)
RLD
Another complicated. Mostly Rolled (21), with some reeled (my preference, at 3). Also appearing: relayed, reload (7), railed (3), and rold (4)
RNW
I expected some tricks, and wished I’d put it sooner in the survey. I was hoping to force renew, thinking the two-syllable nature would open up some lateral thinking here. Half of respondents got there (23/50), while the rest of the spread rarely gets more than 2 aligned (two answers: runway and Renown get 3 each).
This was a successful experiment: half of the people got two syllables and converged, the rest diverged rapidly.
SDR
No consensus here, with seder (9) and solder (7) being the most popular among over 30 unique answers.
Interesting to me are the ones who add consonants: surrender, stride, spider, speeder, and so on.
TRD
Finally we get to the reason I did this. I pass a truck on my daily walk that has a trim proudly proclaiming TRD 4X4. Every day I think “TURD” (woah, that’s a big one!), before correcting myself to “Trad?” while wondering who approved this.
I’m not alone! 32% of respondents see turd here, with other common ones being tried, tread, tired, trade, and trad. After that,w e get a wide variety, including Tardis, triggered, and torrid.
Here’s a read-only copy of the results. Pivot Table 4 breaks down normalized (for capitalization) responses by question. THe raw data is on Form Responses 1.
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TO be clear, the pleas come every other Tuesday. The blog does not specify the frequency of the science you should be doing. ↩
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Forgive me, these were the circumstances I was born into. ↩
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Obviously this will depend a lot on native language and regional dialects and many, many other factors I did not ask about. Forgive me once more, I am new to doing science. ↩
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I suppose I actually asked closer to 2,000 people, as I shared this on Bluesky and in two Discord servers, but I received 111 responses before closing the form. ↩
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Despite having 111 responses, most questions have between 40 and 55 responses. I don’t know what to make of that! ↩
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I realized afterward that I made another mistake here, as my instructions said to fill in missing vowels, which may have been overly prescriptive. Once again, I grovel for your forgiveness. ↩
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Yet. ↩