14 Top Free Serif Fonts with Multiple Weights

If you have a growing collection of usable free sans-serif fonts, you need free serif fonts to complement them. Serifs are one of the foundational types of fonts — many appear on every best fonts list for good reason. Our recent article on the most popular free sans-serif fonts outlined four criteria we came up with to navigate the morass of free fonts readily available on the web. We came up with the best 14, we think. Take a look at that article so we don’t have to repeat the text here, and so that we can get on with our list of free serif fonts. The only criteria we will repeat for clarity, just in case you don’t jump over to the previous article, is this one:

The typeface must have Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights

Serif fonts, unless specifically designed for display and decorative usage, really need these four weights to be useful. You could get a way with not having a bold italic face, granted. However, a typeface that includes all four of these basic weights is likely to have had a lot of attention paid to it, and it’s that attention to detail that indicates the completeness and usefulness of each of the fonts in the typeface. The popularity of these individual serif typefaces wasn’t possible to determine and sort, among and against themselves. Therefore, they are presented alphabetically. Overall, these typefaces are the most popular among all free serif typefaces that met our criteria, according to the various typography resources we consulted. And remember, all that’s left after getting a collection of the best free sans serif and the best free serif fonts is how to combine them! Stay tuned for that article. But for now, make use of this list and start downloading these serifed freebies. NOTE: click images to enlarge