Padded

How to spell padded

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce padded

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does padded mean?

1. adjectiveFilled, lined, or covered with soft material for comfort or protection.
2. verbPast tense of pad: added extra, often unnecessary, material to make something longer or larger.
3. verbPast tense of pad: walked with quiet, soft steps.

Padded in a sentence

• adjective

  The fragile vase arrived safely in a padded envelope.

• verb

  The contractor padded the invoice with charges nobody had approved.

• verb

  The cat padded silently across the kitchen floor.

• adjective

  A padded chair made the long meeting more bearable.

• verb

  She padded the report with filler to reach the page count.

• verb

  He padded down the hall in slippers so as not to wake anyone.

Where does padded come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The base word 'pad' surfaced in English in the 1500s with the sense of a soft cushion or bundle of stuffing, and its exact ancestry is genuinely murky. The most credible link is to Low German and Dutch 'pad', meaning a sole of the foot or a flat cushion, which fits the early use for a saddle pad or a wad of soft material. From that physical 'cushion' sense English built the verb 'to pad', meaning to stuff or line something with soft filling, and the past form 'padded' followed by the regular rule of adding -ed. A separate and probably unrelated 'pad', meaning to tread softly along a path (compare the old slang 'footpad' for a highwayman who went on foot), gave the modern image of feet padding quietly across a floor. The spelling trap is small but real: because the vowel in 'pad' is short and stressed, the d doubles before the ending, so it is 'padded', not 'paded'.

How the word is built

• pad (cushion, soft mass)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix); the single final consonant of 'pad' doubles before -ed because the vowel is short and stressed