Scheherazade New — Free Arabic Google Font
Scheherazade New, from SIL International and named for the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights, is a traditional Naskh design built for complete Unicode Arabic-script coverage — useful well beyond standard Arabic text, into less common characters and diacritics. Recent updates added Medium and SemiBold weights alongside the original Regular and Bold.
About Scheherazade New
Scheherazade New is a traditional Naskh typeface developed by SIL International and named after the heroine of the Arabian Nights. SIL built it to support every Arabic-script character in Unicode 14.0. It was added to Google Fonts in 2021, gained a more extensive glyph set in May 2022, and in April 2023 added Medium and SemiBold weights to the original Regular and Bold.
Developed with particular attention to full diacritic (harakat) rendering accuracy, Scheherazade New is a common pick for religious or academic text specifically because complex diacritic stacking is where many Arabic webfonts visibly break down.
Designer: SIL International
Best used for
- Linguistically diverse Arabic-script text
- Heavily diacritized (vocalized) text
- Academic and language-preservation projects
How Scheherazade New compares
Where Amiri recreates one printing tradition, Scheherazade New is built to render almost any Arabic-script text correctly, including rarer letters used by languages other than Arabic. Its SIL sibling Harmattan follows the West African Warsh style with simplified shaping; of the two, Scheherazade New is the conventional Naskh choice. For everyday modern Arabic with no unusual characters, either Amiri or Scheherazade New will do; for fully vocalised or linguistically varied text, Scheherazade New is the safer pick.
Tips for using Scheherazade New
Reach for Scheherazade New when text is fully vocalised or uses less common characters: language-learning material, linguistic work, Qur'anic or classical text. Its traditional proportions need generous line spacing. SIL documents its features in detail at software.sil.org/scheherazade, which is worth reading if you need specific character variants.
Styles & weights
4 weights, self-hosted:
- 400 — Regular Download .ttf
- 500 — Medium Download .ttf
- 600 — SemiBold Download .ttf
- 700 — Bold 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 Scheherazade New
Using Scheherazade New on the web
Load it from the Google Fonts CDN:
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Scheherazade+New:wght@400;500;600;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">Then reference it in your CSS:
font-family: "Scheherazade New", sans-serif;License
Licensed under the SIL Open Font License — free for personal and commercial use. What the OFL allows →