Pad or pads may refer to:

Wearables

Pads Pads (also called leg guards) are a type of protective equipment used in a number of sports and serve to protect the legs from the impact of a hard ball, puck, or other object of play travelling at high speed which could otherwise cause injuries t ...

, protective equipment used in baseball, cricket, and hockey **

Elbow pad Elbow pads are protective padded gear worn on the elbows to protect them against injury during a fall or a strike. Elbow pads are worn by many athletes, especially hockey players, cyclists, roller skaters, skateboarders, volleyball players, ...

Knee pad Knee pads or kneepads are protective gear worn on knees to protect them against impact injury from falling to the ground or hitting an obstacle, or to provide padding for extended kneeling.Their primary purpose is to shield this vulnerable ...

Shoulder pads (sport) Shoulder pads are a piece of protective equipment used in many contact sports such as gridiron football, lacrosse, and ice hockey and some non-contact sports such as ringette. Most modern shoulder pads consist of a shock absorbing foam material ...

Menstrual pad A menstrual pad is an absorbent item worn in the underwear when menstruating, bleeding after giving birth, recovering from gynecologic surgery, experiencing a miscarriage or abortion, or in any other situation where it is necessary to absorb ...

, used to absorb menstrual or other vaginal blood *

Incontinence pad An incontinence pad is a small, impermeable multi-layered sheet with high absorbency that is used in the incontinence and health-care industries as a precaution against fecal or urinary incontinence. It is generally made of cotton if washable, or ...

, worn to absorb involuntarily expelled bodily fluids *

Shoulder pads (fashion) Shoulder pads are a type of fabric-covered padding used in men's and women's clothing to give the wearer the illusion of having broader and less sloping shoulders. In the beginning, shoulder pads were shaped as a semicircle or small triangle and ...

, fabric-covered padding in clothing *

Cycling pad A cycling pad, also known as "chamois" or "bikepad" or "Fondello" (Italian), Peau (French) is a protective insert that is applied in cycling shorts with the main purpose of protecting the groin from the friction of constant and prolonged saddle ...

, found in cycling shorts, pants and tights

Computing and electronics

Input devices

Gamepad A gamepad is a type of video game controller held in two hands, where the fingers (especially thumbs) are used to provide input. They are typically the main input device for video game consoles. Features Some common additions to the standar ...

, joypad, or controller, an input device used in gaming *

Graphics pad A graphics tablet (also known as a digitizer, digital graphic tablet, pen tablet, drawing tablet, external drawing pad or digital art board) is a computer input device that enables a user to hand draw or paint images, animations and graphics, w ...

, a computer input device *

Keypad A keypad is a block or pad of buttons set with an arrangement of digits, symbols, or alphabetical letters. Pads mostly containing numbers and used with computers are numeric keypads. Keypads are found on devices which require mainly numeric in ...

, buttons arranged in a block *

Touchpad A touchpad or trackpad is a type of pointing device. Its largest component is a tactile sensor: an electronic device with a flat surface, that detects the motion and position of a user's fingers, and translates them to 2D motion, to control a Cu ...

or trackpad, a pointing device featuring a tactile sensor *

Trigger pad A trigger pad is an electronic sensor on a drum that produces a certain sound assigned from a sound module once the head has been struck. This device allows drummers to play at a constant dynamic regardless of the physical force used. Triggers a ...

, an electronic sensor on a drum

Other hardware

Contact pad Contact pads or bond pads are small, conductive surface areas of a printed circuit board (PCB) or die of an integrated circuit. They are often made of gold, copper, or aluminum and measure mere micrometres wide. Pads are positioned on the edges o ...

, the designated surface area for an electrical contact * A resistive pad used in an attenuator * An electronic

notebook A notebook (also known as a notepad, writing pad, drawing pad, or legal pad) is a book or stack of paper pages that are often ruled and used for purposes such as note-taking, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbooking and more. ...

* A

tablet computer A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers ...

* GridPad, the first commercially successful tablet computer *

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

, a tablet computer made by Apple *

ThinkPad ThinkPad is a line of business-oriented laptop and Tablet computer, tablet computers produced since 1992. It was originally designed, created and manufactured by the American IBM, International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation. IBM Acquisit ...

, a laptop brand first designed and produced by IBM, but now owned by Lenovo *

WatchPad The IBM WatchPad was a line of earlier smartwatch prototypes, produced in 2000-2002. Overview In June 2000, IBM displayed a prototype for a wristwatch that ran Linux. The original version had only 6 hours of battery life, which was later extende ...

, discontinued IBM smartwatch line *

WorkPad IBM WorkPad was a line of portable devices, produced by Palm Inc. and branded by IBM. This line contained personal digital assistants (PDAs) and one subnotebook model (WorkPad Z50). Overview This line was released in 1997 and discontinued in 200 ...

, discontinued line of PDA, branded by IBM

Other uses in computing and electronics

One-time pad The one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be Cryptanalysis, cracked in cryptography. It requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent. In this technique, ...

, a method of cryptography

Transportation

Brake pad Brake pads are a component of disc brakes used in automotive and other applications. Brake pads are composed of steel backing plates with friction material bound to the surface that faces the disc brake rotors. Function Brake pads convert the ki ...

, part of a drum brake *

Launch pad A launch pad is an above-ground facility from which a rocket-powered missile or space vehicle is vertically launched. The term ''launch pad'' can be used to describe just the central launch platform (mobile launcher platform), or the entire c ...

, an area where spacecraft start flight *

Helicopter landing pad A helipad is the landing area of a heliport, in use by helicopters, powered lift, and vertical lift aircraft to land on surface. While helicopters and powered lift aircraft are able to operate on a variety of relatively flat surfaces, a fabr ...

Roll way __NOTOC__ A roll way or running pad is the pad placed on a concrete slab or on the ties on the outside of the conventional track along both running rails of a rubber-tyred metro or along the unconventional track of a tram. The rubber-tyred whe ...

or running pad, placed along the rails of metro or tram tracks

Music

* Pad, some holes of

woodwind Woodwind instruments are a family of musical instruments within the greater category of wind instruments. Common examples include flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, and saxophone. There are two main types of woodwind instruments: flutes and Ree ...

instruments (clarinets, saxophones...) are closed by air-tight pads. * Soft, mellow

timbre In music, timbre (), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instrument ...

s generated by

synthesiser A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...

s are often called ''pads'', and are generally used as backing sounds.

Other uses

* Part of a mammal's

paw A paw is the soft foot-like part of a mammal, generally a quadruped, that has claws. Common characteristics The paw is characterised by thin, pigmented, keratinised, hairless epidermis covering subcutaneous collagenous and adipose tissue, whi ...

Pad, Roane County, West Virginia Pad is an extinct town in Roane County, West Virginia West Virginia is a mountainous U.S. state, state in the Southern United States, Southern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States.The United States C ...

* A paper

San Diego Padres The San Diego Padres are an American professional baseball team based in San Diego. The Padres compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (baseball), National League (NL) National League West, West Division. ...

, a Major League Baseball team nicknamed the "Pads"