Why Texas DMV Denied Thousands of 2021 Personalized License Plates

We've all seen them - those special license plates on nice cars (and not so nice ones) - giving you insight into the driver's personality.

Since 1965, we've been able to personalize our license plates in Texas.

However, there are limits to what we can put on those plates, due to state law.

Incidentally, you can do a history check on any vehicle by looking up the license plate at vincheck.info for free.

What Are the Rules?

If you request a plate with the following, there's a good chance it will be denied:

• Foreign words
• Slang words or phrases
• Acronyms
• Reverse spellings
• Spellings that may be considered objectionable or misleading

If the plate you choose gets rejected, you can try something else, get a refund for the cost of a personalized plate, or appeal.

It usually takes about five days to do an application review.

What's Too Rude for the Road?

In 2021, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles rejected more than 6,700 personalized license plate requests in 2021.

They are pretty picky, too.

For instance, the numbers '6' and '9' can't be used together, unless they are used in combination with the vehicle make, as in '69 CHEV'.

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Some Examples of Denied Plates

According to an open records request by KVUE, here are a few of the denied personal plate applications during 2021:

Seems like these were pretty tame. Maybe 'STUDMFN' was too misleading.