Monospaced families, measured side by side

By Kennedy Bryant · 28 October 2026 · data as of 28 October 2026, google/fonts repository

The library files 44 families as monospaced. Of these, 15 use a cell exactly 600 units wide per 1,000 em, the most common width; 18 are variable fonts and 14 declare a slashed or dotted zero.

The cell

In a monospaced font every character has the same advance width, so the average lowercase width we measure for other families is simply the cell width here. Cells range from 400 to 1,000 units. A narrower cell fits more characters on a line; a wider one gives the narrow letters more room.

Lowercase height

The median monospaced x-height is 517, against 519 for sans serifs. The tallest lowercase among them belongs to Digital Numbers (748), followed by Sixtyfour, Workbench and B612 Mono.

Monospaced companions

In all, 19 monospaced families share their name with a proportional family in the library, such as B612 Mono, Cutive Mono and DM Mono. In 13 of these pairs the two x-heights are identical to the unit, so the monospaced version can sit inside the proportional text without a jump in lowercase size; the width, by design, is where they part.

Weights

A single weight is all that 15 monospaced families come in, weight, often a regular for terminals and retro screens, while 15 offer five weights or more. A wide weight range matters less in code than in text, but it lets one family carry headings, emphasis and line numbers in the same rhythm.

Cell width and lowercase

A narrow cell does not mean a short lowercase. The eight families with a 500-unit cell have a median x-height of 518; the 15 with a 600-unit cell have 526. Two of the 500-unit families also cover Chinese, Japanese or Korean, where a Latin letter conventionally takes half the width of a square ideograph.

Variable monospaced families

Variable fonts account for 18 monospaced families; 16 of them have a weight axis, and the full list of axes they use is BLED, MONO, SCAN, wdth, wght. The oldest monospaced families in the library, Anonymous Pro, Cousine and Lekton, date from 2010.

Character sets

Monospaced files are larger than most: their median is 879.0 glyphs against 626 for the whole library. The families that also cover East Asian scripts run into the thousands: LXGW WenKai Mono TC has 22,487. The smallest set belongs to Workbench, with 237 glyphs.

Italics and single styles

Among the monospaced families with an italic, ten are variable fonts, so both the upright and the italic file cover a weight range. At the other end, 14 monospaced families offer one weight and no italic at all: a single file and a single style, the plainest form a family in the library can take.

Features that matter for code

A slashed or dotted zero separates 0 from O. The zero feature is declared by 14 monospaced families, among them Azeret Mono, Fira Code, Fira Mono, IBM Plex Mono and Iosevka Charon. Contextual alternates, which coding fonts use for joined operators such as arrows, are declared in 11. Italics come with 22 of the 44 families, and 3 cover the whole range from weight 100 to 900.

Scripts and colour

Coding fonts often have to set comments and strings in other alphabets. Of the monospaced families, 17 list Cyrillic and 14 list Greek; the most common subsets beyond Latin are Vietnamese (20), Cyrillic (17), Cyrillic Extended (16), Greek (14), Greek Extended (9). On the page, monospaced type is light: the median ink coverage is 36.0% against 40.2% for sans serifs, because the wide cells leave more empty space around each letter. The lightest is Cutive Mono (25.8%), the darkest Workbench (49.8%).

All 44 families

Across the list, x-heights run from 378 to 748 and cells from 400 to 1,000. A “yes” in the zero column means the file declares the zero feature; a family without it may still draw a distinguishable zero by default, which the feature list cannot show. The oldest in the list were added in 2010; the newest in 2026. Families with “no ascenders” draw capital forms on the lowercase keys and have no x-height of their own.

Comparing them

The monospace class page plots all of them against the rest of the library, and the type finder filters them by weight range, italic and script.

Sources

Family metadata (METADATA.pb) and font files from the google/fonts repository as of 28 October 2026; all measurements computed by this site as described in How we measure.

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