Alaska · sequential passenger map
Alaska license-plate format
Alaska passenger plates use three letters, a space, and three digits — a compact northern serial. In this atlas the pattern string uses A for a letter slot and 9 for a digit slot. Other characters are separators that appear on the metal but do not enlarge the combination space.
- Pattern
- AAA 999
- Classes
- 3 letters + 3 digits
- Alphabet size
- 23
- Skipped letters
- IOQ
- Combination count
- 12,167,000
- Model year
- 1981
How the map works
Each A slot independently takes one glyph from ABCDEFGHJKLMNPRSTUVWXYZ. Each 9 slot takes 0–9. The product of those bases is 12,167,000 — the size of the sequential space taught here. Hyphens, spaces and dots in AAA 999 are display only.
Alaska moved from territorial numbering into a letter-digit mix as the vehicle fleet grew. The three-by-three block remains the teaching example because it is short, high-contrast, and still in the passenger series.
Before this map, Alaska used numeric-only and early gold-on-blue runs. Optional graphics (universities, military, environmental) can look nothing like the sequential passenger die and are not counted in the 12,167,000 figure.
I, O and Q are treated as skipped in this atlas to match common die and OCR practice on Alaskan stacks.
Generated versus issued
A string that fits AAA 999 is in-class. It is not automatically an issued plate. Series can skip blocks, retire numbers, or reserve low digits. This essay never queries a motor-vehicle file. See also generated vs issued.