Idiom idiom
pad out
Meaning
To add something extra to something to make it appear more substantial.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“You need to pad out your essay to reach the required length.”
“The writer had to pad out the short story with extra descriptions to fill the remaining pages of the book.”
“Rather than focusing on quality, the speaker chose to pad out the presentation with irrelevant statistics to make the project seem more significant than it truly was.”
Anchors to
Last updated August 10, 2026