Clad means dressed or covered in something. Leather clad, snow-clad hills, clad in black.
It is the old past participle of clothe and it survives mainly in compounds and in literary use. In building, cladding is the outer skin fixed to a structure, and how it is fixed and what it is made of became a matter of life and death after the Grenfell Tower fire. Note clothe, cloth.
1adjectivecladDressed or covered in something.
“The climbers, clad in thick jackets and heavy boots, set off before sunrise.”
clad is a state of covering.
Clad is an old past participle of clothe, from Middle English clethen. Cloth and clothes come from the same root.
Proto-Indo-European
*gleh₁y-
Middle English
clad
English, today
clad
Built from
From Middle English clad, from clethen. From Middle English clad, cladde, cled, cledde, past tense and past participle forms of clethen (“(also figurative) to put clothing on, clothe, dress; to provide clothing to; to arm, equip; to cover, envelop; to conceal; to adorn”), from Old English clǣþan (past tense clǣþde, clædde), from Proto-West Germanic klaiþijan, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European gleh₁y-, gley- (“to adhere, cling, stick to”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA