Merriweather

Try Merriweather

Weights and styles

• Light 300Merriweather Light Light Italic
• Regular 400Merriweather Regular Italic
• Medium 500Merriweather Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Merriweather SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Merriweather Bold Bold Italic
• ExtraBold 800Merriweather ExtraBold ExtraBold Italic
• Black 900Merriweather Black Black Italic

Merriweather is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file per style, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Merriweather

Merriweather is a serif typeface designed as a text face for screens. Its description lists the means: a very large x-height, sturdy serifs, somewhat condensed letters, open forms and a mild diagonal stress, all of which are visible in the specimen, where the lowercase stands tall against the capitals and the serifs are thick and flat. The current fonts are variable on three axes. Weight runs from 300 to 900, width from 87 to 112, and optical size from 18 to 144. Seven weights are named, Light to Black, each with an italic, for 14 styles. The fonts hold 2,298 glyphs covering Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. Eben Sorkin is the designer, and Sorkin Type, a foundry in western Massachusetts, leads the project. A sans serif sister family, Merriweather Sans, was drawn to match. The license is the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Merriweather works

Long articles on screens

The very large x-height and sturdy serifs were chosen so paragraphs stay comfortable on ordinary displays.

Headlines from the same family

The optical size axis reaches 144, so large titles can use a cut drawn for display instead of enlarged text letters.

Copy that must fit a measure

The width axis, 87 to 112, narrows or widens the letters to fit a headline or a tight column without changing typeface.

Russian and Ukrainian text

Cyrillic is part of the 2,298 glyphs, in all weights and in italic.

Reports with strong hierarchy

Black 900 for headings down to Light 300 for notes gives several levels from one family.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Vietnamese
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Cyrillic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Merriweather

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Merriweather on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Merriweather";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Merriweather-Italic-VariableFont_opsz%2Cwdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 900;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Merriweather";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Merriweather-VariableFont_opsz%2Cwdth%2Cwght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 300 900;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Merriweather", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Merriweather with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Merriweather:ital,wght@0,300..900;1,300..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Three axes

Weight 300 to 900, width 87 to 112, optical size 18 to 144. The default instance is Light at normal width and optical size 18.

Heavy download

The two variable files total about 9.2 MB as downloaded. For web pages, subset them or take static cuts from the official source.

No Greek

Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese are covered; Greek is not.

FAQs

Collections with Merriweather

• Serif fonts for long reading on screens

  Text serifs drawn for screens or for long reading: large x-heights, moderate contrast and real italics for articles, blogs and documentation.

• Variable fonts with a width axis

  Variable families in which letter width is adjustable as well as weight, from slight narrowing for copy-fitting to a full condensed-to-wide range.

• Variable fonts with an optical size axis

  Variable families that redraw themselves for the size they are set at: sturdier and looser when small, finer and tighter when large.

• Type systems with matching sans, serif and mono families

  Families designed to be used together: a sans, a serif or slab and often a monospace that share proportions, weights and character.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts