If you are a curious person, it is likely that you have noticed the following peculiarity: the car license plates in Spain they do not have vowels. This is established by the identification code followed by vehicles registered in Spain, which combine four numbers, from 0000 to 9999, and three letters starting with BBB and ending with ZZZ.
The main reason for this enrollment system is to avoid the possibility of generating bad-sounding words or inappropriate through the acronyms and combinations formed by these three letters that appear on vehicle license plates. However, these are not the only letters vetoed in Spanish license plates.
These are the prohibited license plates in Spain
With the entry into force of the current enrollment system In the year 2000, letters and numbers that could cause misunderstandings or form inappropriate words were eradicated (some examples could be ANO, PIS, ETA…). Thus, this code does not admit the aforementioned vowels, to which other letters are added that can cause problems when identifying a vehicle.
This is the case of letters like the Ñ and the Q, which are banned in the registration code. The reason for the prohibition of these letters on car plates is that they can cause confusion due to their resemblance to letters like N or Owhich can cause problems when identifying a vehicle by its license plate.
Other letters that cannot be part are the CH and the LLwhich were vetoed with the intention that they could not form license plates with four characters. Furthermore, when this code came into force, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language had already excluded these signs from the alphabet as they were considered digraphs.
In this way, nine letters of the alphabet are excluded from Spanish car license plates: A, CH, E, I, LL, Ñ, O, Q y U.