Choosing the numbers on your plate Numerology

What do numbers mean to you?

When it comes to vehicle registrations, there’s more to the numbers on your plate than you might think. Over this short series of articles we’ll look at the various reasons people choose certain numbers for their plates.

What do the numbers on a number plate mean? The numbers on a current style plate represent the year the registration was released. With something like AN07 BAE, for example, the 07 refers to 2007. On this style plate, it will always appear after the first two letters. If the number looks too large to be a year – let’s say AN57 BAE – then simply deduct 50. (This is because there are two new releases of registrations each year.)

Prior to this style plate, the numbers were simply issued in sequential numerical order, although some were held back for registrations that would be sold through agents like Plates4Less, through DVLA’s SOM scheme or auctioned.

But of course, as the owner of a private registration, the numbers on the plate aren’t necessarily going to be random, nor do they need only be the year of the registration’s release. Indeed, some people put a lot of stock in the power of numbers.

Numerology

There are those who also believe that numbers can have a significant, mystical bearing on their lives. Numerology is the belief in a relationship between numbers and events and personalities, similar to astrology. Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, believed that numbers held a power or energy that affected the physical world. The synchronicity, or seemingly meaningful relationship, between numbers and life events is something that goes back many, many years. The Babylonians gave us what became Chaldean numerology. Hebrew mystical practices gave us Kabbalah numerology. Using details like your date of birth or full name, you can determine various numerical values that may represent aspects of your character or suggest some future course of events.

Your ‘life path number’

Your life path number comes from your birth date. Through a process of addition, you reduce your birth date to a single number, or ‘root number’, and this is believed to represent your greater purpose, focusing on your personal strengths and weaknesses.

If your birthday was the 25 th of May, 1976, you would proceed as follows:

The 25 of your day of birth is reduced by adding the 2 and 5, getting 7.

The 0 and 5 for the month of May, added together, gives you a 5.

The year becomes 1 + 9 + 7 + 6, giving 23. However, you need to reduce the numbers are far as possible, so 2 + 3 gets you 5.

Finally, add all of these results together and then reduce again where possible.

So, 7 + 5 + 5 = 17, and because you need to reduce the numbers as far as possible, 1+7 = 8.

Your life path number would be 8.

The only numbers that do not get reduced are 11 and 22. These are considered Master Numbers and are very special and suggest greater success.

Your ‘destiny number’ or ‘expression number’

If your life path number is suggestive of purpose, your destiny number represents how you might go about achieving or expressing that purpose.

To find this you need to use a system devised by Pythagoras that attributes numerical values to letters of the alphabet and then apply these values to your full name.

The numerical scores for your name are then added together and reduced down as far as possible just as with your life path number. (Don’t forget, 11, 22, and 33 do not get reduced.)

So, Lisa Rose Smith would become:

3+9+1+1 for Lisa, which is 14, which becomes 1+4, giving us 5.

Rose is 9+6+1+5, which gets 21, which becomes 3.

And Smith is 1+4+9+2+8, which is 24, reduced down to 6.

After all that, 5 (Lisa) + 3 (Rose) + 6 (Smith) gives us 14, which is reduced down via 1+4 to give us a destiny number of 5.

What is your destiny number?

Sceptical about numerology?

Of course, there are other reasons people choose specific numbers for their plate. Lucky numbers, house numbers, special dates and ages – these are just a few. People also use numbers as letter replacements or to act as homophones, or they choose them for the connotations (as with the recent release of the 69 plates!).