padding

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of pad

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Soft filling material used in cushions etc.
2. (countable, uncountable)Extra characters such as spaces added to a record to fill it out to a fixed length.
3. (countable, uncountable)Extraneous text added to a message for the purpose of concealing its beginning, ending, or length.
4. (countable, uncountable)Anything of little value used to fill up space.

   “That magazine is mostly advertisements; the rest is padding.”

   “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. (countable, uncountable)The process of mordanting a fabric.
6. (countable, uncountable)A diaper.
7. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Robbing on a highway.