Experimenting with Fonts

If a website requests a generic font, what font does your computer supply?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 Updated Feb 9, 2025

By Conrad Halling

1 min read

The generic font families specified by CSS styles include monospace, serif, sans-serif, fantasy, and cursive. When a CSS style requests one of these generic font families, what actual font is used on your computer? This page provides an experiment in seeing what fonts are used.

These were the fonts that were used on my different devices:

Font Family	macOS 15.3	iOS/iPadOS 18.3	Windows 11 24H2
monospace	Menlo	Menlo	Consolas
serif	Times New Roman	Times New Roman	Times Hew Roman
sans-serif	Helvetica	Helvetica	Arial
fantasy	Papyrus	Zapfino	Arial
cursive	Apple Chancery	Snell Roundhand	Comic Sans MS
Verdana	Verdana	Verdana	Verdana
Georgia	Georgia	Georgia	Georgia

Generic Fonts

Monospace

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur, adipisicing elit. Eaque modi quisquam ratione commodi! Debitis, quis ducimus! Sunt repellat ea aspernatur illum temporibus numquam omnis quod quia, nemo eos. Cum, quia?

Serif

Sans-serif

Fantasy

Cursive

Website Standard Fonts

Sans-serif

I have configured the Jekyll theme for this website to use Verdana (a sans-serif web safe font family) for headings and labels and to use Georgia (a serif web safe font family) for content text when converting Markdown to HTML.

Computing

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.