Word and fact of the day: Saturday, October 24, 2026

Peabody's word of the day for October 24, 2026 is "bumpy" (full of bumps, not smooth) at level 2, up to "redolent" 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 24 October 2026

Level	Word of the day	What it means	In a sentence
2	bumpy	full of bumps, not smooth	The bumpy road made the wagon rattle.
3	fragile	easy to break	Carry the fragile eggs carefully.
4	agile	able to move quickly and easily	The agile cat leapt onto the shelf.
5	lethargic	very tired and slow to move	The heat made everyone lethargic.
6	voracious	wanting to eat or do a lot	The voracious reader finished five books in a week.
7	pensive	quietly thinking deeply	She was pensive while watching the rain.
8	redolent	full of a pleasant smell	The kitchen was redolent of fresh bread.

Fact of the day

Level	Fact	From
1	Blue on a map is water.	Land and Water (Geography)
2	Do you want something big? Save a little money every week. Soon your jar is full, and you can buy it!	Needs and Wants (Money)
3	How much should kids move every day? Doctors say kids your age need at least sixty minutes of moving each day. That is one whole hour! It does not have to be all at once. Ten minutes here and twenty minutes there all add up.	Sixty Minutes a Day (Move)
4	A fossil is what is left of a plant or animal from long ago. It might be a bone or a shell, the print of a leaf, or even a footprint left in soft mud. When the mud turned to stone, the shape was saved. Fossils show us what lived in a place. They help us see how that place has changed over time.	Fossils and Rock Layers (Science)
5	Space is the area around objects and between them. In a picture, the space can be crowded or empty, and artists carefully plan both parts. Color is what we see when light bounces off an object, like red or blue. Value is how light or dark a color is. Adding white to paint makes a lighter value, and adding black makes a darker one. Artists use light and dark values to make flat things look round.	The Elements of Art (Art)
6	Why do some songs sound happy and others sound sad? A big part of the answer is the scale that a song is built on. A scale is a set of notes that climbs up in order, one step at a time. On a piano, the distance from one key to the very next key, black or white, is called a half step, and two half steps put together make a whole step. Most scales mix whole steps and half steps in a set pattern, and changing that pattern changes the feeling of the music.	Major and Minor (Music)
7	To keep track of the elements, scientists use a big chart called the periodic table. Each box on the chart stands for one element and shows a short sign, like H for hydrogen, O for oxygen, and C for carbon. Elements that act alike are placed in the same column, one above the other. In 1869, a Russian scientist named Dmitri Mendeleev made an early form of the table. He even left empty spaces for elements that no one had found yet, and later on, other people found them, just as he had said they would.	Atoms and Molecules (Science)
8	Our own minds can trick us, too. People tend to notice the evidence that agrees with what they already believe and to skip right past the evidence that doesn't, a habit that psychologists call confirmation bias. Suppose you believe your lucky socks help you win games. You will probably remember every win in those socks and quietly forget the losses. To fight confirmation bias, look on purpose for evidence that could show you are wrong, and count it as carefully as the evidence you like. Good thinkers also change their minds when new and better evidence comes along. Changing your mind is not the same as losing; it shows that you are following the evidence wherever it leads.	Weighing Evidence (Think)
9	How can a ramp let you move something you could never lift by hand? To answer that question, engineers begin with the scientific idea of work. In physics, work is done when a force moves something over a distance, and you find it by multiplying the force by the distance, so work equals force times distance. Force is measured in units called newtons, and distance is measured in meters, so work is measured in newton meters, which scientists also call joules. Lifting a box that weighs 200 newtons onto a stage 1 meter high takes 200 joules of work. Lifting the same box 2 meters high takes twice as much, or 400 joules, because the useful work depends only on the weight of the box and the height it is raised.	Work and Mechanical Advantage (Workshop)
10	The contour interval is the set difference in elevation between one contour line and the next one, and its value is printed in the margin of each individual map. On a map with a 20-foot interval, for example, the lines might mark 6,000 feet, then 6,020 feet, then 6,040 feet, and so on up the slope. To make counting easier, every fifth line is drawn thicker and labeled with its elevation, and these heavier lines are called index contours. On that same map, the index contours would therefore appear every 100 feet, because five intervals of 20 feet add up to exactly 100 feet. The interval itself varies from one map to another, depending mainly on the type of terrain being shown and on the scale of the map. Experienced map readers always check the margin before they begin to calculate any elevations.	Reading a Topographic Map (Geography)
11	Why does the same dollar buy less as the years go by? The Federal Reserve defines inflation as the increase in the prices of goods and services over time. When prices rise, each dollar buys a little less than it did before, so inflation reduces what economists call purchasing power, which is the amount of goods and services a sum of money can buy. Imagine a basket of groceries that costs 100 dollars this year: if prices rise by 3 percent, the same basket will cost 103 dollars next year, and someone who still has exactly 100 dollars can no longer buy all of it. Inflation describes the average change across a great many prices at once, not the price of one item, so some prices can fall even while the overall level is rising.	Inflation and What Money Buys (Money)
12	How can you tell whether a website you have never heard of is trustworthy? Many people try to answer by studying the page itself, checking whether it looks professional, displays an impressive logo or uses an address that sounds official. Teachers call that habit vertical reading, because you stay on one page and scroll up and down it. The difficulty is that almost anyone can build a polished, convincing website. Researchers at the Stanford History Education Group, whose work Common Sense Education draws on, watched professional fact-checkers evaluate unfamiliar sites and noticed a different habit: the fact-checkers quickly left the page to find out what other sources said about it. This strategy is called lateral reading, since you move sideways across many sources instead of digging deeper into a single one. You learn about a page by leaving it.	Reading Laterally (Online)
13	The first law, however, does not tell the whole story. Imagine a mug of hot cocoa sitting on a table in a cool room. The cocoa gradually cools while the surrounding air warms very slightly, until both of them reach the same temperature, and then the change stops. Energy would still be conserved if heat flowed the other way, making the cocoa hotter and the room colder, yet that never happens spontaneously, which means on its own, without help. The second law of thermodynamics describes this everyday observation: heat flows naturally from a hotter object to a colder one, and never in the reverse direction unless something forces it to. A refrigerator does move heat out of its cold interior and into the warmer kitchen, but it can do so only because a motor performs work to push the heat along, using electrical energy from the outlet in the wall. Without that outside work, the heat would simply leak back inside again.	Heat, Energy and Entropy (Science)

Each fact is a page from one of Peabody's World trails, which carry named sources; this one cites National Geographic Education: map skills for elementary students.

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.

Keep going

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 24 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.