padding

• IPA^(key): /ˈpædɪŋ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ædɪŋ
• Homophone: patting (General American)

From pad +‎ -ing.

padding

1. present participle and gerund of pad

From pad +‎ -ing.

padding (countable and uncountable, plural paddings)

1. Soft filling material used in cushions etc.
2. (computing) Extra characters such as spaces added to a record to fill it out to a fixed length.
3. (military, cryptography) Extraneous text added to a message for the purpose of concealing its beginning, ending, or length.^[1]
4. Anything of little value used to fill up space.

   That magazine is mostly advertisements; the rest is padding.

   • 1920, Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, London: Pan Books, published 1954, page 135:

     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 or other, Japp wished to keep it out of the papers.

5. The process of mordanting a fabric.
7. (ABDL) A diaper.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:diaper

8. (obsolete) Robbing on a highway.

paddíng

1. wall