Pad

How to spell pad

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pad

What does pad mean?

1. nounA piece of soft material used to protect, cushion, or absorb pressure.
2. nounA number of sheets of paper fastened together along one edge for writing or drawing.
3. verbTo walk with quiet, steady, soft steps.
4. verbTo make something longer or fuller by adding extra, often unnecessary, material.

Pad in a sentence

• noun

  The nurse pressed a clean gauze pad over the wound.

• noun

  She tore a sheet from the pad and jotted down the address.

• verb

  The cat would pad silently across the kitchen floor each morning.

• verb

  Reviewers warned the author not to pad the report with filler.

• noun

  A thick foam pad made the hard chair bearable during the long meeting.

• noun

  Keep a pad by the phone so messages do not get lost.

Where does pad come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Pad is a short, slippery word with more than one tangled origin, which is part of why its history is uncertain. The sense meaning a soft cushion or wad of stuffing first appears in English in the late 1500s, and lexicographers have never pinned down a clear parent; it may be an imitative or dialectal coinage for something soft and lumpy. A quite separate strand comes from the Low German and Dutch word 'pad', meaning a path or track, which fed into older English slang such as 'footpad' for a robber who travelled on foot and into 'pad' meaning to tramp along a road. From that path sense grew the verb 'to pad', meaning to move with soft, steady steps, since walking the road quietly was the footpad's trade. The cushion noun later spawned the figurative verb 'to pad out', meaning to make something fuller with extra, often unnecessary, material. Because the spelling is just three letters with no silent traps, the confusion is conceptual rather than orthographic: the same little word covers cushions, paper blocks, animal feet, launch sites, and quiet walking.

How the word is built

• pad (single root; English word of obscure, probably Low German or Dutch origin, with no prefix or suffix)