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, sk ...

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. Use Sports Knee pads are worn in many recreationa ...

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, or simply a pad, (also known as a sanitary pad, sanitary towel, sanitary napkin or feminine napkin) is an absorbent item worn by women in their underwear when menstruating, bleeding after giving birth, recovering from gynecolo ...

, 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 p ...

, 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

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 Gamepads generally feature a set of ...

, 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 images, animations and graphics, with a spec ...

, 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 pointing device featuring a tactile sensor, a specialized surface that can translate the motion and position of a user's fingers to a relative position on the operating system that is made output to the screen. Touchp ...

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 designated surface areas of a printed circuit board (PCB) or die of an integrated circuit. Possibilities to contact to pads include soldering, wirebonding, flip chip Flip chip, also known as controlled collapse ...

, 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. History ...

* GRiDPad, known as first commercial tablet computer *

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...

, a tablet computer made by Apple *

ThinkPad ThinkPad is a line of business-oriented laptop computers and tablet computers, tablets designed, developed and marketed by Lenovo, and formerly by IBM until 2005, when IBM's Personal computer, PC business was acquired by Lenovo. ThinkPads have ...

, 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 exten ...

, discontinued IBM smartwatch line * WorkPad, discontinued line of PDA, branded by IBM

Other uses in computing and electronics

One-time pad In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is not smaller than the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a ran ...

, 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 kin ...

, 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 ...

, an area where spacecraft start flight *

Helicopter landing pad A helipad is a landing area or platform for helicopters and powered lift aircraft. While helicopters and powered lift aircraft are able to operate on a variety of relatively flat surfaces, a fabricated helipad provides a clearly marked hard s ...

Roll way 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 wheels roll di ...

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 reed ...

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 quality of a musical note, sound or musical tone, tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voice ...

s generated by

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

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, w ...

Pad, Roane County, West Virginia Pad is an extinct town in Roane County, West Virginia West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Vi ...

* 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 (NL) West division. Founded in 1969, the club has won two NL penna ...

, a Major League Baseball team nicknamed the "Pads"