Word and fact of the day: Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Peabody's word of the day for October 20, 2026 is "sniff" (smell with short, quick breaths) at level 2, up to "lugubrious" at level 8, with a fact at each of levels 1 to 13. Words and facts come from Peabody's own banks, with no AI, and are free through the end of 2026.

By Aaron, founder of PeabodyChecked 20 October 2026

Level	Word of the day	What it means	In a sentence
2	sniff	smell with short, quick breaths	The puppy sniffs every flower in the park.
3	feeble	weak and not strong	My feeble flashlight barely shines.
4	vast	huge and wide-spreading	The vast ocean stretched to the sky.
5	serene	calm and peaceful, without worry	The serene garden was full of birdsong.
6	replenish	fill up again	We replenished the bird feeder.
7	malleable	easy to press or hammer into shape	Gold is malleable enough to flatten into sheets.
8	lugubrious	sad and gloomy in a heavy way	The lugubrious donkey sighed in the rain.

Fact of the day

Level	Fact	From
1	A dog needs food. It needs water too.	What Plants Need (Science)
2	Mix red and yellow. You get orange, like a pumpkin! Mix blue and yellow to get green.	Mixing Colors (Art)
3	A town needs money to pay for parks, libraries, roads and fire trucks. Much of that money comes from taxes. A tax is money people pay to the town. Kids can help their town too, by picking up trash or helping a neighbor.	Who Runs a Town? (Citizenship)
4	What does Colorado's land look like? It has three big parts. In the east are the Eastern Plains. This is a wide, flat land of grass, wheat farms, and cattle ranches. In the middle stand the Rocky Mountains. Their tall peaks stay snowy for much of the year. Far to the west, past the mountains, is the land called the Western Slope.	Colorado's Land (Geography)
5	In 1776, leaders from the colonies met in the city of Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson wrote most of a paper called the Declaration of Independence. It said the colonies were now free and would rule themselves. The leaders approved it on July 4, 1776. That is why the Fourth of July is the birthday of the United States. The colonies were already at war with Great Britain, and the fighting went on for years. In the end the new country won its freedom.	From Colonies to a Country (History)
6	Circles can also show you what only might be true. Suppose some kids in the band play drums, and you know that Kai is in the band. Can you tell for sure whether Kai plays drums? You can't be sure, because he might play drums, but nothing in the facts says that he has to. You should be careful with the word all, too, because one case can knock down an all rule. That case is called a counterexample, which means an example that breaks the rule. If someone says that all birds can fly, a penguin is a counterexample, since a penguin is a bird that can't fly.	All, Some and None (Think)
7	How does a bridge hold up a heavy truck? It handles two kinds of force at the same time. Compression is a force that squeezes or pushes a material together, while tension is a force that stretches or pulls a material apart. Press down on a sponge and you see compression, because the sponge gets shorter, and pull on a rubber band and you see tension, because the band gets longer. Every part of a bridge feels one of these forces, or both at once, so engineers choose materials to match the job. Stone and concrete are strong when they are squeezed, but they crack more easily when they are pulled. Steel cables are very strong when pulled, but a cable cannot push, because it simply bends.	Tension and Compression (Workshop)
8	Long ago, every town set its clocks by its own sun, so noon in one town could be several minutes different from noon in the next. When railroads began crossing entire countries, this created real confusion about train schedules. Today the world is divided into time zones, which are wide strips where everyone uses the same clock time. Each zone is about 15 degrees wide, or one hour of Earth's rotation, although many edges bend to follow borders. The starting line is the prime meridian, 0 degrees longitude, which runs through Greenwich, England. The world's time standard, Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, grew out of the time kept there. Every zone is counted in hours ahead of or behind UTC.	Time Zones (Geography)
9	Two more taxes appear on nearly every pay stub under the name FICA, short for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. The Social Security tax is 6.2 percent of pay, up to a high yearly limit, and it mainly pays benefits to retired people and people with disabilities. The Medicare tax is 1.45 percent, and it helps pay for Medicare, a federal health insurance program generally for people 65 and older or with disabilities. Employers pay a matching share of both taxes. For Maya's 600 dollars, Social Security takes 37 dollars and 20 cents, and Medicare takes 8 dollars and 70 cents. If 30 dollars of federal income tax is also withheld, her net pay is 524 dollars and 10 cents. This trail explains a paycheck; it doesn't give tax advice.	Your Paycheck: Gross and Net (Money)
10	What does the little lock next to a web address really mean? It means the connection between your device and the website is encrypted. CISA, the federal agency that works on cybersecurity, explains that encryption scrambles information into unreadable coded language so that only someone with the right key can access it. A simple example is a secret code in which every letter shifts three places down the alphabet, so CAT becomes FDW, which is a little like passing a note that only your closest friend knows how to read. Anyone who knows the key, which here is to shift each letter back three places, can unscramble the message easily. Modern encryption uses mathematical keys that are enormously harder to guess, so scrambled data looks like meaningless nonsense to anyone without the key, even if they manage to capture it while it travels.	Encryption and the Lock Icon (Online)
11	Arranged from the longest wavelengths to the shortest, the electromagnetic spectrum runs from radio waves through microwaves, infrared and visible light, and then on to ultraviolet, X-rays and finally gamma rays. Radio waves range from about the length of a football to wider than our whole planet, while gamma rays have the tiniest wavelengths of all. As the wavelength gets shorter and the frequency rises, each wave carries more energy, which is why gamma rays carry the most energy of any wave in the spectrum. Visible light, the only part that our eyes are able to detect, is just a thin slice near the middle of it. Within that thin slice, red light has the longest wavelength and violet light has the shortest, and when sunlight passes through a glass prism, the different wavelengths bend by different amounts and spread apart into the familiar colors of the rainbow.	Waves and Light (Science)
12	Finally, look for strong verbs that are hiding inside nouns. A nominalization is a noun made from a verb, such as "decision" from decide or "improvement" from improve, and it often forces a sentence to lean on a weak, general verb like make or have. The sentence "The team made an improvement to its defense" becomes "The team improved its defense" once the real action moves back into the verb. Similarly, "We came to the conclusion that the plan would work" can become "We concluded that the plan would work." Revising this way makes writing livelier and easier to follow, because each sentence places its actor first and expresses its action through the verb. Read your draft aloud, and wherever you stumble or lose track of who is doing what, experiment with trimming, combining or rearranging until the meaning comes through cleanly and confidently.	Clear, Concise Sentences (Write)
13	How can a machine made of tiny switches do arithmetic? It relies on logic gates, the elementary building blocks of every modern computer. The Computer History Museum explains that computer circuits are built from simple elements called gates, made from either mechanical or electronic switches, and that just three operations, AND, OR and NOT, can perform all logic functions. These operations come from the system of reasoning that the English mathematician George Boole set out in the nineteenth century, which is now called Boolean logic in his honor. In 1937, Claude Shannon's master's thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed how Boolean algebra could be applied to the design of circuits built from electrical relays. Inside a modern processor, enormous numbers of microscopic transistors serve as the switches, operating far faster than any relay, but the underlying logic remains essentially the same logic that Boole originally described more than a century and a half ago.	Logic Gates (Code & Robots)

Each fact is a page from one of Peabody's World trails, which carry named sources; this one cites USDA Forest Service, Natural Inquirer: what plants need (water, light, air and nutrients).

How the day's picks are made

Nothing is written for the day and nothing is asked of a child. The date picks one word from each level's bank of 40 words and one fact from each level's bank (61 facts at level 1, 63 facts at level 2, 53 facts at level 3, 50 facts at level 4, 49 facts at level 5, 39 facts at level 6, 39 facts at level 7, 39 facts at level 8, 39 facts at level 9, 39 facts at level 10, 38 facts at level 11, 39 facts at level 12 and 39 facts at level 13), visiting each before any repeats. The levels are Peabody's own thirteen; the word bank covers levels 2 to 8, the fact bank levels 1 to 3.

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Questions parents ask

How do I use the word of the day?

Say the word and its meaning at dinner, look for it in a book, and use it once yourself. Then see if your child spots it.

Which level should my child read?

Pick the row near the reading level Peabody shows for them. Level 2 is early readers and level 8 is a strong middle-school reader; the levels and grades page shows where each grade starts.

Is it free?

Yes, free through the end of 2026, with no sign-up.

Checked against how Peabody works on 20 October 2026. Written with help from AI, from Peabody's own code and library. Peabody is a learning app, not an assessment: if you're worried about your child's learning, talk to their teacher.