16 (number)


16 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,, and.
In English speech, the numbers 16 and 60 are sometimes confused, as they sound very similar.
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 a hexadecimal digit from 0 to 15 in each column.

Mathematics

Sixteen is an even number and a square number.
Sixteen is the fourth power of two.
Sixteen is the only integer that equals mn and nm, for some unequal integers m and n. It has this property because 22 = 2 × 2. It is also equal to 32.
Sixteen is the base of the hexadecimal number system, which is used extensively in computer science.
Sixteen is the largest known integer n for which 2n+1 is prime.

Science

Hinduism

Grammar

In Spanish and Portuguese, 16 is the first compound number ; the numbers 11 through 15 have their own names.

Age 16

Many leagues and tournaments have 16 teams or individual participants, for example:
In both the NBA and NHL, 16 teams qualify for the respective league playoffs; it is also the number of wins needed to win the title.
In AFL Women's, the top-level league of women's Australian rules football, each team has 16 players on the field at any given time.

In other fields