The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Cousine
A free alternative to Courier.
About Cousine
Cousine is a monospaced face by Steve Matteson, released on Google Fonts in 2010 and drawn to be metric-compatible with Courier New. Character widths and line metrics match the original exactly, which is the entire brief. The letterforms are typewriter-derived and slab-serifed in the Courier manner, but the drawing stays conservative throughout — this is a substitution face, not a revival with a point of view about how Courier ought to look.
As a Courier stand-in it's the least romantic and the most faithful choice available: a straight swap for documents where fidelity outranks character. Code listings, legal filings, screenplays, and any file that has to paginate identically on a machine without Courier New installed are its natural territory. If the goal is Courier's look improved for screens rather than reproduced, a revival drawn for that purpose serves better — Cousine's job is to be indistinguishable.
- Designer
- Steve Matteson
- Released
- 2010
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
Cousine is also a free alternative to…
- Courier → Drawn by Steve Matteson to be metric-compatible with Courier New — same character widths, same line metrics, drop-in replacement when document fidelity matters most. The least-romantic but most-faithful match in this list.
- Consolas → Part of the Chrome OS core fonts, drawn with metrics matched to Courier New so it drops into layouts without reflow. Cousine shares Consolas's clean sans-serif monospaced construction and slashed zero, though its letterforms are plainer and less distinctive in the italic.
- New Heterodox Mono → A metric-compatible stand-in for Courier New with a cleaner, sans-serif drawing and generous Latin, Greek and Cyrillic coverage. It fits the same fixed-pitch slot in terminals and listings, offering reliability and easy CDN loading in place of New Heterodox Mono's expressive Didone details.
Display + body that work together
Pages that earn the read
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Mono · Editorial Cousine + Source Serif 4
Letters that hold their nerve
Crisp, even strokes give the display its punch. Quiet serifs underneath stay readable across thousands of words — used together by editors at the kind of paper that still prints corrections.