padding

Pluralpaddings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Soft filling material placed inside cushions, furniture, or clothing to add comfort or shape.

   Upholsterers replaced the worn padding beneath the leather seat.

   The winter jacket's padding kept him warm on the mountain trail.

   Similarstuffing, filling, wadding, cushioning, batting

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Material of little value added simply to fill up space, especially extra words in writing or speech.

   The report's padding made it twice as long as it needed to be.

   Critics complained the speech was mostly padding with little real substance.

   Similarfiller, fluff, waffle, verbiage

   Oppositesubstance

   Note

   The critic's sense, and almost always a complaint: whatever fills the page or the hour without earning its place. It pairs naturally with mere and mostly. In Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), the narrator scans the papers and finds only "a column of mere padding" about the case. A writer who pads a report produces padding.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   In computing, filler characters such as spaces that bring a record up to a required fixed length.

   The encoder inserts padding to bring each block up to the required width.

   Removing the padding restored the record to its original data.

   Similarfiller

   Note

   Programmers speak of a field being padded out with spaces or other filler until it reaches a fixed width. The filler carries no information and is stripped away when the data is read back. It is usually a mass noun: you add padding or remove the padding. Contrast the cryptographer's padding, which is added to hide a length rather than to reach one.

4. 4
   verb

   Present participle of pad.

   The workers are padding the crates before shipping them overseas.

   Investigators discovered he was padding his expense reports for months.

   Note

   One spelling carries every sense of the verb. It covers a mover padding crates, an accountant padding an expense report with filler, a batsman padding the ball away with the leg guard, and a walker padding a quiet road. Each use is transitive, so even the travel sense takes its path as a direct object. Don't confuse the participle with the stuffing itself, a noun formed the same way.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   Extraneous text added to a message to conceal its beginning, ending, or length.

   The cipher clerk inserted padding to mask where the real message began.

   Random padding kept eavesdroppers from measuring the transmission's true length.

   Note

   Here meaninglessness is the whole purpose. Signals and cipher work use padding to hide where the real text starts and stops, and how long it runs, so that an interceptor gains no foothold from a message's edges or size. It differs from filler in a dull article in one key way: it is put there deliberately, as camouflage rather than laziness.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A diaper; the absorbent garment worn by an infant to catch waste.

   Grandmother pinned the cloth padding snugly around the infant.

   The toddler's padding needed changing right after the afternoon nap.

   Similarnappy, diaper, napkin

   Note

   A word from the ABDL community, the subculture of adults with an interest in diapers. Within that circle it serves as a soft, euphemistic name for the garment. Outside it, calling a baby's diaper padding sounds odd and may be read as an in-group reference. In everyday talk about infants, diaper is the safe word.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   The process of treating a fabric with a mordant so that it will take and hold dye.

   Careful padding ensured the silk would take the dye evenly across the bolt.

   The dyehouse completed the padding before the fabric ever reached the color vats.

   Similarmordanting

   Note

   A dyer's word that names the work, not the cushion. It is the noun of the verb pad in its textile sense of imbuing cloth uniformly with a mordant, and that evenness is the point: cloth saturated evenly takes color evenly. Outside dyeing it is rarely met. Talk of vats, bolts and dye is what separates it from the stuffing sense.

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