Cairo — Free Arabic Google Font
Cairo pairs a Kufi-influenced Arabic design with a Latin companion built on Titillium Web, giving it wide, open counters and short ascenders that stay legible at small sizes and striking at large ones. With weights spanning Light to Black, it moves comfortably from body copy to bold headlines without losing its geometric character.
About Cairo
Cairo was designed by Mohamed Gaber, a type designer based in Cairo, Egypt, with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino credited alongside him. He took the Latin family Titillium Web and drew an Arabic for it, basing the Arabic on the Kufi calligraphic style. It was added to Google Fonts in 2019 and is now a variable font with weight and slant axes. The Arabic glyph set covers Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.
Designed by Mohamed Gaber, Cairo takes the existing Latin typeface Titillium Web and extends it with a Kufi-influenced Arabic covering Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu. Because both scripts share the same wide, open counters and short ascenders, Cairo has become a common default for bilingual Arabic/English interfaces.
Designers: Mohamed Gaber, Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino
Best used for
- UI and product design
- Headlines and branding
- Multilingual Arabic/Farsi/Urdu content
How Cairo compares
Cairo's Kufi roots give it a squarer, more angular texture than Tajawal, whose geometric shapes stay closer to calligraphic construction and feel calmer in long paragraphs. Against Almarai, Cairo offers a far wider weight range — eight weights here against Almarai's four — which matters when one family has to cover everything from small captions to a heavy display headline.
Tips for using Cairo
Use the lighter weights for body text and the heavy end for headlines, as its designer intended. The short ascenders and descenders let you set lines tighter than most Arabic fonts without clashes. Because the Latin is Titillium Web, mixed Arabic and English text matches automatically; if you add a second Latin face, a plain grotesque keeps the two from competing.
Styles & weights
8 weights, self-hosted:
- 200 — Extra Light Download .ttf
- 300 — Light Download .ttf
- 400 — Regular Download .ttf
- 500 — Medium Download .ttf
- 600 — SemiBold Download .ttf
- 700 — Bold Download .ttf
- 800 — Extra Bold Download .ttf
- 900 — Black Download .ttf
Arabic character preview
ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم — مرحبا بالعالم — ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩
Download Cairo
Using Cairo on the web
Load it from the Google Fonts CDN:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Cairo:wght@200;300;400;500;600;700;800;900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">Then reference it in your CSS:
font-family: "Cairo", sans-serif;License
Licensed under the SIL Open Font License — free for personal and commercial use. What the OFL allows →