This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2014, held in Turku, Finland, in August 2014. The 27 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The conference dealt with the following topics: Automata, grammars, languages and other formal systems; various modes of operation and complexity measures; trade-offs between computational models and modes of operation; succinctness of description of objects, state explosion-like phenomena; circuit complexity of Boolean functions and related measures; resource-bounded or structure-bounded environments; frontiers between decidability and undecidability; universality and reversibility; structural complexity; formal systems for applications (e.g., software reliability, software and hardware testing, modeling of natural languages); nature-motivated (bio-inspired) architectures and unconventional models of computing; complexity aspects of combinatorics on words; Kolmogorov complexity.