Word.ws English Dictionary

padding

/ˈpædɪŋ/

padding is the present participle and gerund of pad.

Noun

padding (countable and uncountable, plural paddings)

  1. Soft filling material used in cushions etc.
  2. Extra characters such as spaces added to a record to fill it out to a fixed length.
  3. Extraneous text added to a message for the purpose of concealing its beginning, ending, or length.
  4. Anything of little value used to fill up space.
    • That magazine is mostly advertisements; the rest is padding.
    • But to my intense surprise, on getting down early the next morning, and eagerly opening the newspapers, there was not a word about the arrest! There was a column of mere padding about “The Styles Poisoning Case,” but nothing further. It was rather inexplicable, but I supposed that, for some reason...1920, Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, London: Pan Books, published 1954, page 135
  5. The process of mordanting a fabric.
  6. A diaper.
  7. (obsolete) Robbing on a highway.

Meaning of pad

Verb

pad (third-person singular simple present pads, present participle padding, simple past and past participle padded)

  1. (transitive) To stuff.
  2. (transitive) To furnish with a pad or padding.
  3. (transitive) To increase the size of, especially by adding undesirable filler.
    • The author began to pad her succinct stories with trite descriptions to keep up with current market trends.
  4. (transitive) To imbue uniformly with a mordant.
    • to pad cloth
  5. (transitive) To deliberately play the ball with the leg pad instead of the bat.
  6. To walk with soft steps.
    • pad down the corridor

See all 44 meanings of pad

Synonyms of padding

11 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of padding

pluralpaddings

Origin of padding

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

From pad + -ing.

Words formed from padding

Phrases with padding

Words that rhyme with padding

Questions about padding

What does padding mean?
Padding means soft filling material used in cushions etc.
What is padding the present participle and gerund of?
Padding is the present participle and gerund of pad.
What part of speech is padding?
Padding is a noun.
How do you pronounce padding?
Padding is pronounced /ˈpædɪŋ/.
What is the plural of padding?
The plural of padding is paddings.

Words near padding in the dictionary

  1. Padden
  2. padder
  3. padders
  4. paddie
  5. paddies
  6. padding
  7. padding down
  8. padding out
  9. padding the hoof
  10. padding up
  11. padding-ken

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: padding (page history and authors); pad (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-padding.wav.

Cite this entry: “padding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/padding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.