16

There are about 16 thousand words spoken by a person in a day (adults, English speakers). From recorder studies with a mean near 16,000 and an enormous spread — individuals ranged from under 700 to over 47,000. The often-repeated claim that women speak three times as many words as men did not survive measurement.

Sixteen ounces to the pound is a halving system: a pound divides to eight, four, two and one ounce with nothing but repeated splitting, which is what a balance scale and a set of weights actually do. Decimal weights are easier to calculate with and harder to weigh out by halving.

The international VHF marine channel for distress, safety and calling is 16 (worldwide, ITU).

There are 16 named colours in the original HTML specification (worldwide, HTML 4.01). Black, silver, gray, white, maroon, red, purple, fuchsia, green, lime, olive, yellow, navy, blue, teal and aqua — chosen to match the VGA palette of the day. Modern CSS recognises around 148, most of them inherited from a list shipped with the X Window System.

There are about 16 million colours in a 24-bit image (worldwide, true-colour displays). Exactly 16,777,216 — 2²⁴, eight bits each for red, green and blue. The figure is exact rather than estimated, and the human eye can distinguish nothing like that many.

Hexadecimal (base-16) is the standard number system used in computing to represent binary data compactly — from web colour codes to memory addresses — because each hexadecimal digit corresponds to exactly four binary bits.

There are 16 avoirdupois ounces in a pound (the imperial and US customary systems). A troy pound has twelve troy ounces and is lighter overall, so precious metals are weighed on a different pound entirely. A fluid ounce is a volume and relates to neither.

"Sweet sixteen" is a documented US/UK coming-of-age birthday milestone tradition, distinct from any single legal age of majority.

Sixteen is the age of consent across the United Kingdom and in many other countries, and the age at which a person can hold a moped licence in Great Britain. Scotland additionally treats 16 as the age of full legal capacity for most purposes, which the rest of the UK does not.

2⁴ and 4² both equal 16, and it is the only whole number expressible as aᵇ = bᵃ with a and b different. Every other pair either fails or is a trivial repeat. It is also 2⁴ and therefore a fourth power as well as a square — which is why one hexadecimal digit covers exactly four bits.

In Ifá divination among Yoruba-speaking peoples, sixteen principal odu form the basis of the divination corpus (Nigeria, Benin, and the African diaspora). Each odu carries a body of verses a diviner learns by memory. The system is one of the most studied divination traditions in the world and was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. This is a scholarly account rather than the tradition's own framing.

Presented as belief or tradition, not as an established fact.