16 (sixteen) is the natural number following 15 and preceding 17. 16 is a composite number, and a square number, being 4² = 4 × 4. It is the smallest number with exactly five divisors, its proper divisors being 1, 2, 4 and 8.

In speech, the numbers 16 and 60 are often confused. When carefully enunciated, they differ in which syllable is stressed: 16 /sɪksˈtiːn/ vs 60 /ˈsɪksti/. However, in dates such as 1666 or when contrasting numbers in the teens, such as 15, 16, 17, the stress shifts to the first syllable: 16 /ˈsɪkstiːn/.

Sixteen is the fourth power of two. For this reason, 16 was used in weighing light objects in several cultures. The British have 16 ounces in one pound; the Chinese used to have 16 liangs in one jin. In old days, weighing was done with a beam balance to make equal splits. It would be easier to split a heap of grains into sixteen equal parts through successive divisions than to split into ten parts. Chinese Taoists did finger computation on the trigrams and hexagrams by counting the finger tips and joints of the fingers with the tip of the thumb. Each hand can count up to 16 in such manner. The Chinese abacus uses two upper beads to represent the 5s and 5 lower beads to represent the 1s, the 7 beads can represent from a hexadecimal digit from 0 to 15 in each column.

Vijender Singh Beniwal (born October 29, 1985) (also known as Vijender Singh or Vijender Beniwal) is an Olympic Medalist Indian boxer from Kalwash, Bhiwani district in Haryana.Vijender’s early days were spent in his village where he did his schooling, after which he received a bachelor’s degree from a local college in Bhiwani. He practiced boxing at the Bhiwani Boxing Club where coach Jagdish Singh recognized his talent and encouraged him to take to professional boxing.

Vijender went on to compete at the sub-junior nationals where he won a silver medal for two years in succession. Having won medals in different competitions at the national level, Vijender was picked to train and compete at several international level competitions such as the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games. At the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, he won the bronze medal after losing the semifinal bout against Kazakhstan's Bakhtiyar Artayev. At the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, he defeated Carlos Góngora of Ecuador 9–4 in the quarterfinals which guaranteed him a bronze medal—the first ever Olympic medal for an Indian boxer.