The 16th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching was held on Jeju Island Korea on June 19-22 2005. Previous meetings were held in Paris London Tucson Padova Asilomar Helsinki Laguna Beach Aarhus Piscataway Warwick Montreal Jerusalem Fukuoka Morelia and Istanbul over the years 1990-2004. In response to the call for papers CPM 2005 received a record number of 129papers.Eachsubmissionwasreviewedbyatleast threeProgramCommittee members with the assistance of external referees. Since there were many hi- quality papers the Program Committee s task was extremely di?cult. Through an extensive discussion the Program Committee accepted 37 of the submissions tobepresentedattheconference.Theyconstituteoriginalresearchcontributions in combinatorial pattern matching and its applications. Inadditiontotheselectedpapers CPM2005hadthreeinvitedpresentations by Esko Ukkonen from the University of Helsinki Ming Li from the University of Waterloo and Naftali Tishby from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We would like to thank all Program Committee members and external r- erees for their excellent work especially given the demanding time constraints; they gave the conference its distinctive character. We also thank all who s- mitted papers for consideration; they all contributed to the high quality of the conference. Finally we thank the Organizing Committee members and the graduates- dents who worked hard to put in place the logistical arrangements of the c- ference. It is their dedicated contribution that made the conference possible and enjoyable.