Font explainer
Times New Roman on a headstone: what families should know
Times New Roman is by a wide margin the most-searched serif font name in the world. It comes installed on every Word document. It’s the default body text of academic writing. And it’s the most common mistake families make when specifying a font for a headstone.
Closest Monumize font
Roman Serif
When a family asks for Times New Roman, they almost always mean "a traditional serif font that looks right on a headstone." That’s Roman Serif (Cinzel). The letterforms are heavier where stone needs heavy strokes, the serifs are wider where stone needs visual anchor, and the historical lineage is the actual one — inscriptional Roman capitals rather than 1930s newspaper text.
About Times New Roman
Times New Roman was commissioned by The Times of London in 1931 specifically for newspaper body text — designed to fit more words per column inch than the previous Times Roman face, with letterforms tuned for the high-resolution metal type of newsprint printing. Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent drew the face. It is, in every meaningful design sense, a face built for paper at small sizes.
History
Times New Roman has never been a monument font. The earliest American sandblast inscriptions predate it by decades. The conflation between "Times New Roman" and "the serif font on headstones" happens because most consumers don’t know the name "Cinzel" or "Trajan" or the dozen other inscriptional faces — they reach for the serif name they do know.
Times New Roman on a headstone
Cut at 1.5-inch cap height in granite, Times New Roman reads as visibly weaker than the inscriptional Roman faces a monument shop would cut by default. The strokes are too uniform; the serifs are too small; the contrast is set for newsprint, not for stone. The result is a thin, somewhat clinical-looking inscription that most families don’t love when they see it.
Frequently asked questions
- Can any monument shop cut Times New Roman?
- Most can — but a good shop will gently suggest a real inscriptional serif instead. The family that insists on Times New Roman after seeing both side-by-side is rare.
- What if the existing inscription on the stone is actually in Times New Roman?
- It almost certainly isn’t, even if it looks like it. The existing inscription is more likely to be a mid-century shop-house Roman variant. Monumize’s AI photo analysis will identify the closest family — usually Roman Serif or Classic Serif, not Times New Roman.
See the Monumize alternative
Roman Serif delivers the same visual register without the engraving issues that come with Times New Roman.