padding
n.soft material used to make something more comfortable or to protect it. You also use this word for extra, useless information added to a text to make it longer.
n.soft material placed inside an object to provide comfort, shape, or protection from impact. In a linguistic context, refers to superfluous words or sections added to a document to increase its length without adding value.
“The old chair needs more padding in the seat.”
“The student added several paragraphs of padding to his essay to meet the minimum word count requirement.”
“While the protective padding in the helmet successfully absorbed the initial impact, the athlete still suffered a minor concussion due to the sheer force of the collision.”
Uncountable when referring to the material or the abstract concept of extra text; occasionally countable when referring to specific pads in a garment.
From pad + -ing.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.