Thai font · COMMERCIAL

Leelawadee

ลีลาวดี

By Narongsak Chaiwong

Typography & Licensing Specialist, ThaiGraph · June 13, 2026

Information verified as of June 2026

What Leelawadee is

Leelawadee is Microsoft’s looped Thai sans serif, supplied with Windows since Vista, and the basis of Leelawadee UI — the family Windows 8.1 and later use to render Thai in the interface. Microsoft’s typography documentation lists two families: Leelawadee in Regular and Bold, and Leelawadee UI in Regular, Semilight, and Bold.

The name is the Thai word for the plumeria flower (ลีลาวดี). Microsoft’s font list credits no individual designer; the copyright sits with Microsoft Corporation. Where Angsana New and Cordia New carried two decades of Thai office documents from the print era into Word, Leelawadee was drawn for screens, and Leelawadee UI now does the work Tahoma once did in Thai Windows installations.

Character design and tone

Leelawadee keeps traditional looped Thai letterforms — closed circular heads on consonants such as ก and ภ — with low contrast between thick and thin strokes, a combination Adobe’s specimen notes describe as designed for legibility onscreen. The result reads as nearly monolinear, neutral, and administrative-modern.

The Latin half is not an afterthought. Capitals and lowercase derive from Segoe UI, with documented adjustments: a narrower capital M with raised apex, tails on the lowercase i and l, and a serif-free capital I. A Thai-English paragraph set in Leelawadee therefore sits comfortably next to standard Windows UI text. Against Cordia New, the older bundled looped sans, Leelawadee holds up better at small screen sizes because its loops are larger and its strokes more even.

Weights and availability

Leelawadee ships in two cuts, Regular and Bold; Leelawadee UI adds a Semilight and extends script coverage to Lao, Buginese, and Khmer alongside Thai and Latin. Neither family has italics.

Microsoft’s product tables list Leelawadee from Windows Vista (font version 5.00) through Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11, plus Windows Server 2008. Leelawadee UI appears from Windows 8.1 onward. Both families are also available inside Office applications as cloud fonts. There is no Thin, no Black, and no plan Microsoft has published to extend the weight range.

Where Leelawadee comes from

Leelawadee arrives with a licensed copy of Windows or Office; Microsoft offers no standalone download. Designers get it three legitimate ways: a Windows machine, an Office installation, or — for Leelawadee UI — an Adobe Fonts activation under a Creative Cloud subscription, which Adobe’s terms cover for design projects, website publishing, PDFs, and video. Enterprise redistribution and self-hosting require a separate licence through Microsoft’s typography licensing channel.

The trap is the web. Because the font sits on effectively every Thai Windows machine, CSS stacks can reference 'Leelawadee UI' as a system fallback at no cost — but extracting the TTF and serving it via @font-face breaches Microsoft’s redistribution terms, and macOS and Android visitors never had the font in the first place. A Windows-only font stack fails silently for half a Thai audience.

Free alternatives

Sarabun is the closest open substitute: a looped Thai sans built for documents and interfaces, free on Google Fonts in eight weights. It covers everything Leelawadee does and adds the light and italic cuts Microsoft never drew.

Noto Sans Thai is the safer choice for multilingual products; its looped Thai matches the rest of the Noto system and ships in a full weight range. Niramit offers a looped sans with more warmth for editorial settings. All three carry open licences that permit web embedding, which Leelawadee does not.

Best use cases

Leelawadee UI is the correct choice when the brief is to match the Windows system look in Thai. Strong briefs:

• Windows desktop applications localised into Thai, where the UI font should match the OS
• Office templates, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks circulated inside Windows-standardised Thai organisations
• Internal tools and intranets viewed exclusively on managed Windows fleets

Where it does not fit: public websites (no web licence, no cross-platform presence), brand identities, and print editorial. For those, the open alternatives above do the job without the licence question.

Pairings

Segoe UI is the natural Latin partner, since Leelawadee’s own Latin already derives from it. Three pairings:

• Segoe UI — the documented source of Leelawadee’s Latin glyphs; bilingual Windows UI stays uniform
• Sarabun — open looped sans for documents that must travel beyond Windows
• Cordia New — legacy continuity in organisations migrating old Thai Office templates

See /learn/typography/ for bilingual system notes.

Licensing

Leelawadee is proprietary Microsoft software, licensed through Windows and Office, with web and redistribution rights sold separately. It cannot be self-hosted, embedded, or shipped inside non-Microsoft products on the bundled licence alone. Leelawadee UI is usable under a Creative Cloud subscription via Adobe Fonts; enterprise terms run through Microsoft’s licensing pages. For projects that need open terms, Sarabun and Noto Sans Thai substitute cleanly. Verify current terms at the Microsoft Typography Leelawadee entry.

Information verified as of June 2026