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The standard-issue Oregon license plate has six digits, three numbers and three letters. How many license plates have to be issued before we move on to seven digits? — Robert, Talent  We paraphrased your note for the sake of brevity, so here's hoping you find our plating-process findings insightful, Robert. We reached out to Oregon Department of Transportation spokesman David House in search of answers. The current tree-design Oregon plates, which outfit approximately 90 percent of Oregon passenger vehicles, according to House, has a standard format of three numbers followed by three letters.  We used what little math skills we have left here at Since You Asked headquarters to calculate 26^3 x 1,000 for a total of 17,576,000 combinations.  House explained that the actual total is less for a couple of reasons. First, some of those three-letter combinations are stricken because they spell words we can't repeat without raising the ire of our publisher. If you need further guidance on three-letter expletives, we suggest organizing a game of Scrabble with a 12-year-old. The second reason is that some of those plate combinations were already used during the limited-run "Oregon Trail" plate series first released in 1994 and used until the early 2000s.  You may have noticed that Oregon tree plates once used three letters followed by three numbers, until 2004 when the format ended with "ZZZ 999." "We switched to numbers/letters and picked up where the Oregon Trail plates left off," House said. "Some (numbers) have been used, and others we won't use because of those awkward combinations." With 3.1 million passenger vehicles currently registered in Oregon, and just over 90 percent of those using the standard tree plate, the need for an extra digit is 20 to 30 years away.  "We don't have to worry about this for at least 20 years," he said. License plates are manufactured in sequential order, but there's some variation in their distribution depending on the size of the DMV office.  License numbers are never recycled and put back in the hopper. Send questions to “Since You Asked,” Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by email to [email protected]. We’re sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them.