Merriweather

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Sorkin Type

Foundry

Sorkin Type

Released

2011

Category

Serif

Alternative to

Georgia

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Body text, News sites, Long-form reading, Blogs

Weights

300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

Yes

Glyphs

2,384

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Vietnamese

Download size

6.2 MB

Source

github.com/EbenSorkin/Merriweather4

Questions

Is Merriweather free for commercial use?

Yes. Merriweather is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement. You can use it in client work, in products you sell, on the web and in print. The one thing you may not do is sell the font file on its own. The licence is inside the download.

Can I use Merriweather in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Merriweather belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Sorkin Type. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install Merriweather?

Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 2 font files inside and open them, then press Install Font. On Windows, select them, right-click and choose Install. Restart any application that was already open before it will show up. Merriweather is a variable font: those files carry all 7 weights at once. Some older software — Word, Canva, and Photoshop before 2018 — reads only the one weight the file defaults to, and for Merriweather that is Light (300), not the regular.

Does Merriweather support Turkish?

Yes. Merriweather includes the characters Türkçe needs that plain Latin does not — the dotless ı, the dotted İ, and ğ, ş, ü, ö and ç in both cases. This was checked against the font file itself, not assumed from the fact that it covers Latin.

What languages does Merriweather support?

Merriweather covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended and Vietnamese, across 2,384 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

Does Merriweather support Cyrillic?

Yes. Merriweather includes the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Cyrillic Extended set as well, which adds the letters for languages beyond Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian. This was read from the font file itself. The complete WOFF2 and the zip both carry it; only the Latin-only web file leaves it out.

What weights does Merriweather come in?

Merriweather comes in 7 weights: Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), Semi Bold (600), Bold (700), Extra Bold (800) and Black (900). It is a variable font, so every one of them is in a single file and you can also set any weight in between.

Is there a smaller, Latin-only version of Merriweather?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 1396 KB against 2422 KB for the complete file, 42% smaller, with every weight the family has still in it. It covers Latin and Latin Extended, which is everything a page in English, Turkish or a western European language sets — Türkçe included, since ı, İ, ğ and ş all live in that range. Take the complete file instead if you set Cyrillic, Greek or any alphabet outside Latin.

Where can I download Merriweather as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is merriweather.woff2, and it is about 2422 KB. It is the complete font repacked for the web rather than a cut-down copy: the same glyphs, the same spacing and the same hinting as the .ttf in the download, roughly 60% smaller. Every browser still receiving updates reads WOFF2, so it is the only web format most sites need. Google Fonts does not offer this file for download at all — it serves WOFF2 from its own servers and gives you .ttf if you ask for the family.