Font Name Checker

Naming a typeface is the one creative decision you cannot quietly change later. Check your name against the index before you build a release around it, or generate fresh candidates that arrive already checked. Why the name carries legal weight is covered in our guide to font trademarks and design patents.

A specimen name card under a magnifying glass, beside a checklist with two items ticked and one flagged with a question mark

The index covers every published family on FontSpace, the complete Google Fonts catalog, a curated index of classic and commercial typefaces, and the registered trademarks we have verified. Names are also screened against a trademark watchlist of some 2,760 terms: major franchises and famous brands. A watchlist hit raises a Caution and names the term; it is a flag to search harder, not a claim that a specific registration covers your name. The full font.io master corpus, about a million names including the commercial libraries, plugs into this same checker when the database launches.

Watchlist brand terms are seeded from the lake-hope/brandnames list (CC BY-SA 4.0), pruned of ordinary English words.

How the check works

Exact matches. Your name, and its base form with generic suffixes set aside (Sans, Serif, Pro, Text), is compared against every name in the index. "Lato Pro" collides with Lato.

Near matches. Trademark trouble is usually a sound-alike, not a copy. The checker flags names that differ by a letter or two, names that sound the same spoken aloud, names that contain yours or are contained in it, anagrams, and names differing only in easily confused letters.

Registered marks. A short, verified list of typeface name trademarks (Times Roman, Helvetica, Lucida, with their registration numbers) gets the strongest warning, exact or near.

Trademark watchlist. Beyond fonts, a name can collide with a famous mark from another industry. The watchlist's core tier (franchises, and marks their owners actively enforce) matches by substring; its brands tier matches whole words only, so an innocent name that merely contains a brand's letters is not flagged. A watchlist hit is reported as a Caution naming the term and its tier. It is not a registered-mark finding.

Protectability. A name built entirely from descriptive words ("Bold Serif") cannot be protected as a trademark, however clear it is of collisions, and common dictionary words make weak marks. The checker says so.

What this cannot tell you

This is a screen, not a legal clearance. The index is a fraction of the world's font names for now, trademarks exist outside fonts, and rights vary by country. A name that earns a Clear here still deserves a formal search of the USPTO trademark database before a commercial release, and a trademark attorney for anything you plan to build a business on. The background reading: trademarks and design patents and font copyright law.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The whole check runs in your browser against the downloaded index.