Merriweather font free download: the ZIP below holds 2 font files with 3 variable axes and 2,384 glyphs, plus the OFL licence.
Yes — Merriweather is free for commercial use, including in books and long-form work you sell
Merriweather is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (OFL). You can use it in client work, logos, products you sell, apps and print, without paying and without asking permission.
Merriweather was designed by Sorkin Type for one job: being pleasant to read on a screen. Everything in it serves that — a very large x-height, slightly condensed letterforms, mild diagonal stress, sturdy serifs that survive rasterisation, and open forms that stay distinct at small sizes. There is a matching Merriweather Sans that harmonises with these weights, which makes it one of the few free serifs you can build a complete text system around.
We read the license state from the font file itself rather than from a listing. The embedding permission flag (fsType) is 0 — Installable, the least restrictive value in the OpenType specification.
Quick facts
| Designer | Sorkin Type |
| Added to Google Fonts | May 2011 |
| Version | Version 2.100 |
| License | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| Commercial use | Yes, no attribution required |
Embedding (fsType) | 0 — Installable, unrestricted |
| Variable font | Yes — 3 axises (Weight, Width, Optical Size) |
| Weights | 7 named (300 Light → 900 Black) |
| Glyphs | 2,384 |
| Characters covered | 1,423 |
| OpenType features | 28 |
| Vietnamese support | Yes, full |
| Download size | 6.1 MB — 2 font files + OFL.txt |
Download Merriweather
What’s in the download
The download is a single ZIP containing 2 font files plus the licence:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| Merriweather-Italic[opsz,wdth,wght].ttf | Variable italic — 3 axes: Optical Size, Width, Weight |
| Merriweather[opsz,wdth,wght].ttf | Variable upright — 3 axes: Optical Size, Width, Weight |
OFL.txt travels with the files — keep it in the folder if you pass the font on to anyone else. Total download 6.1 MB.
The download includes the OFL license file. Keep it in the package if you redistribute the font.
Pairing suggestion. Newsreader on The Asset Crate — another free reading serif, with an optical-size axis Merriweather also carries.
Merriweather also works as body text under a condensed or light sans: see our Oswald pairings and Raleway pairings for Canva.
Internal link to our own coverage, not an external ad.
What the OFL license actually lets you do
You can:
- Use Merriweather in commercial projects, including client work you bill for
- Use Merriweather in a logo or brand identity, and trademark that logo
- Sell products that use Merriweather — merchandise, packaging, book covers
- Embed Merriweather in websites, apps, games, PDFs and ebooks
- Modify Merriweather and redistribute your modified version
You cannot:
- Sell the font file on its own, outside a larger bundled product
- Distribute it without the OFL license file
- Release a modified version under a Reserved Font Name
No attribution is required in your design. The OFL only asks that the license file travels with the font files.
Inside the file: 2,384 glyphs and 1,423 characters
Merriweather ships 2,384 glyphs covering 1,423 Unicode codepoints.
Vietnamese, and 13 other languages in full
Tested against the full alphabets of a reference set of languages, Merriweather fully covers 14:
Vietnamese · Spanish · French · German · Portuguese · Italian · Polish · Czech · Turkish · Romanian · Hungarian · Dutch · Nordic (da/no/sv) · Cyrillic
Vietnamese is fully supported, including stacked diacritics such as ế, ộ, ữ and ỹ — worth checking before you commit, because many free families stop at Latin Extended-A and silently drop them.
Which Unicode blocks those 1,423 characters cover
| Block | Covered |
|---|---|
| Basic Latin | 95 / 96 |
| Latin-1 Supplement | 95 / 96 |
| Latin Extended-A | 127 / 128 |
| Latin Extended-B | 180 / 208 |
| IPA Extensions | 41 / 96 |
| Greek | 9 / 144 |
| Cyrillic | 239 / 256 |
OpenType features: 28 in the file
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
aalt | All alternates |
c2sc | Caps to small caps |
calt | Contextual alternates |
case | Case-sensitive forms |
ccmp | Glyph composition |
dlig | Discretionary ligatures |
frac | Fractions |
kern | Kerning |
liga | Standard ligatures |
lnum | Lining figures |
locl | Localized letterforms |
mark | Diacritic positioning |
Plus 16 further feature tags in the file, mostly stylistic-set and script-specific tables.
Variable axes: 3
- Weight (
wght): 300 to 900, continuous - Width (
wdth): 87 to 112, continuous - Optical Size (
opsz): 18 to 144, continuous
The optical-size axis is the rare one. At low values the letterforms are drawn with more open counters and sturdier hairlines so they survive small sizes; at high values contrast increases and the design tightens for display use. Set font-optical-sizing: auto in CSS and most browsers will drive it from font-size without further work.
The width axis lets you condense or extend without a separate font file — useful for fitting headlines to a fixed column rather than dropping the size.
Because this is a single variable file, every intermediate value is available. One file replaces the whole static weight set, which usually means a smaller total download than shipping three or four static cuts.
A tall x-height (0.555) — drawn to hold at small sizes
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Units per em | 2,000 |
| Ascender | 1,968 |
| Descender | -546 |
| Cap height ratio | 0.743 |
| x-height ratio | 0.555 |
An x-height ratio of 0.555 is high. Large lowercase letters make text look bigger at the same point size and hold up well at small sizes and on low-resolution screens — the trade is that long passages can feel dense.
Right for long reading, wrong at poster size
Good fit: Long-form articles, documentation, ebooks, blogs — anywhere someone reads more than a paragraph on a screen.
Poor fit: Large display settings, where the sturdy serifs and low contrast read as heavy rather than elegant.
Need something a free family cannot give you? Licensed families usually ship more weights, more alternates and a matched companion face:
Browse font families on Creative Market
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More free serif coverage
- Newsreader — another free reading serif, with an optical-size axis Merriweather also carries
The license state and every technical figure on this page were read directly from the Merriweather font binary — fsType embedding bits, glyph counts, character coverage, OpenType feature tables, variable-axis ranges and vertical metrics — not copied from a third-party listing. Last verified 23 August 2026 against version Version 2.100.
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