Padding

How to spell padding

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce padding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does padding mean?

1. nounSoft material used to fill, cushion or protect something.
2. nounExtra words or material added to make something seem longer or more substantial than it really is.

Padding in a sentence

• The cycling jacket has extra padding around the shoulders for protection.

• The report would be much shorter without all the padding in the introduction.

• She replaced the worn padding inside the old armchair.

• The editor cut the padding and kept only the essential points.

Where does padding come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This word grows from the noun 'pad', a soft cushion or mass of stuffing, which appears in English from the late 1500s. The origin of 'pad' itself is genuinely murky, but it is usually linked to Low German or Dutch words such as the Low German 'pad', meaning 'sole of the foot' or 'cushion', a sense that suggests something flat, soft and protective. By the 1700s 'pad' was widely used for the wadding placed inside clothing, saddles and furniture to soften and shape them. Adding the suffix '-ing', which turns a verb or noun into a word for the material or the activity involved, produced 'padding': the stuffing itself and the act of stuffing. The figurative meaning, extra words added to fill out a piece of writing or a speech, arose by analogy in the 1800s, since both kinds of padding bulk something out without adding real substance. The single 'd' becoming double before '-ing' follows the ordinary English rule for a short stressed vowel, which is the small spelling point worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• pad (cushion, soft mass)
• -ing (noun suffix forming the resulting material or action)