padding

Soft filling material used in cushions etc.

Extra characters such as spaces added to a record to fill it out to a fixed length.

Extraneous text added to a message for the purpose of concealing its beginning, ending, or length.

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.

The process of mordanting a fabric.