padding

• IPA^(key): /ˈpædɪŋ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

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

padding

1. present participle and gerund of pad

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. (obsolete) Robbing on a highway.
6. The process of mordanting a fabric.

paddíng

1. wall