The quasi-elastic scattering excitation function of the doubly magic 16O+208pb system at a backward angle is measured at sub-barrier energies with high precision. The diffuseness parameters extracted from both the single-channel and the coupled-channels calculations give almost the same value α = 0.76±0.04 fm. The results show that the coupling effect is negligible for the spherical system. The obtained value is smaller than the extracted value from the fusion excitation function, but larger than the value of α = 0.63 fm, which is from the systematic analysis of elastic scattering data.