padding

American  

[pad-ing] / ˈpæd ɪŋ /

noun

• paddings
  plural

1. material, as cotton or straw, used to pad something.

2. something added unnecessarily or dishonestly, as verbiage to a speech or a false charge on an expense account.

3. the act of a person or thing that pads.

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padding British  

/ ˈpædɪŋ /

noun

1. any soft material used to pad clothes, furniture, etc

2. superfluous material put into a speech or written work to pad it out; waffle

3. inflated or false entries in a financial account, esp an expense account

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• paddings
  plural

Etymology

Origin of padding

First recorded in 1820–30; pad ¹ + -ing ¹

Explanation

A cushioning or protective material is padding. When you're moving into a new apartment, you might want to wrap your dishes in padding to keep them from being damaged. Padding has many different uses, from the padding in a padded mailing envelope to the padding in a sofa cushion that gives you a soft place to sit. There's also padding inside protective sports gear and built into yoga mats. Sometimes padding is simply used to make something seem bigger, and from this meaning comes the sense of padding meaning "unnecessary extra material," especially superfluous words in a speech or a book.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

padding paddings

The padding provides short-term protection against broken bones, but at terrible long-term cost.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 30, 2026

And when one of us finally came padding down the wooden stairs, sleepy and rumpled and operating on a schedule she would never have personally endorsed, there was no reproach.

From Salon ● Aug. 31, 2026

There was the helmet with a safe amount of padding and the padding-deprived helmet that may have been obtained with a vanilla sundae at Dairy Queen.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 20, 2026

To her, lily padding is the future of work, not just a trend, as people who follow the tactic try to reach more senior roles and higher pay.

From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2026

A moment of silence, then the sound of his feet padding towards me.

From "Code Name Kingfisher" by Liz Kessler

The freshly dead were still encased in woolen paddings or blue uniforms.

From Time Magazine Archive

The book, when pulled to pieces, without end papers and sewing, should be about one-sixth thinner than with the paddings of the cover, thin books, of course, a little more.

From Practical Bookbinding by Paul Adam

They swallowed their liqueurs, and the ashes of their cigars fell on the paddings of the furniture.

From Bouvard and Pécuchet A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life by Gustave Flaubert

And billah, she has stuffings and paddings, too.

From The Book of Khalid by Ameen Fares Rihani

Observe the “antediluvian” shape of the bat—no paddings on the legs. 

From Pickwickian Manners and Customs by Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald