padding vs shim

padding

noun
  • 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. 

shim

noun
  • A thin piece of material, sometimes tapered, used for alignment or support. 

  • A small library that transparently intercepts and modifies calls to an API, usually for compatibility purposes. 

  • A kind of shallow plow used in tillage to break the ground and clear it of weeds. 

  • A small metal device used to pick open a lock. 

  • A person characterised by both male and female traits, or by ambiguous male-female traits; a hermaphrodite. 

  • A wedge. 

  • A transsexual person, especially a trans woman; (loosely) a drag queen or transvestite. 

verb
  • To fit one or more shims to a piece of machinery. 

  • To adjust the homogeneity of a magnetic field, after the mechanical devices once used for the purpose. 

  • To adjust something by using shims. 

  • To intercept and modify calls to (an API), usually for compatibility purposes. 

How often have the words padding and shim occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )