Word and fact of the day: Sunday, October 25, 2026
Peabody's word of the day for October 25, 2026 is "gather" (bring things together into one place) at level 2, up to "sagacious" 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.
| Level | Word of the day | What it means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | gather | bring things together into one place | We gather leaves into a big pile. |
| 3 | wilt | droop because there is no water | Flowers wilt in the hot sun. |
| 4 | sprint | run as fast as you can | We sprinted to the finish line. |
| 5 | diminish | become smaller or less | The puddle diminished in the sun. |
| 6 | iridescent | shining with rainbow colors that shift | The bubble had an iridescent shine. |
| 7 | exuberant | overflowing with joy and energy | The exuberant crowd danced in the street. |
| 8 | sagacious | wise and showing good judgment | The sagacious owl gave the best advice. |
Fact of the day
| Level | Fact | From |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | You can sing. Your voice makes music! | Loud and Quiet (Music) |
| 2 | Can you make a brand new color? Red, yellow and blue are the primary colors. Many other colors start with them. | Mixing Colors (Art) |
| 3 | When one thing covers part of another, it looks like it is in front. This trick is called overlapping. Far-off things also look paler and less sharp. The part of a picture that seems closest is the foreground, and the part farthest away is the background. | Near and Far in Pictures (Art) |
| 4 | A conditional asks a question that is either true or false. Is there a wall ahead? If the answer is true, the robot turns. If the answer is false, the robot does something different instead, and coders write that part with the word else. So the whole rule says: if there is a wall ahead, turn; else, go forward. | If There's a Wall (Code & Robots) |
| 5 | Next, try a calm tool. Take slow belly breaths. Breathe in through your nose while your belly fills up like a balloon, and then let the air out slowly through your mouth. You could also go for a walk, draw a picture of the feeling, squeeze a pillow or listen to quiet music. Different tools work for different people, so try a few and find the ones that help you the most. | Calm Tools for Big Feelings (Health) |
| 6 | Next comes the evidence, which is the facts that support your claim. Evidence might be numbers from a test you ran, something you saw for yourself, or a quote from a book or an article. In the cup test, your evidence could be that after one hour, the ice in the foam cup was still mostly solid, while most of the ice in the metal cup had melted. Evidence should be exact, so numbers and careful notes are stronger than words like a lot or pretty fast. If you can, give more than one piece of evidence. | Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (Write) |
| 7 | A truss is a frame made of many triangles joined together, and the triangles are the secret to its strength. A triangle cannot change its shape unless one of its sides changes length. A square made of sticks can be pushed over into a slanted shape, but a triangle made of the same sticks stays firm. In a truss, some bars are in tension and others are in compression, and together they share the load. A suspension bridge hangs its road from long steel cables that are strung between tall towers. The cables are in tension, while the towers are in compression. Engineers build and test models of each design, compare how well they carry a load, and then improve the parts that fail. | Tension and Compression (Workshop) |
| 8 | Why does Spanish have two verbs that both mean to be? English uses a single verb, to be, for many different jobs, but Spanish divides those jobs between two verbs, ser and estar. Choosing the right one depends on what you want to say, and a helpful way to remember the difference is that ser usually describes what someone or something is, while estar describes where it is and how it is right now. Both verbs are irregular, which means their forms do not follow the usual patterns, so it is worth learning them by heart. Once you know the main idea, though, the choice becomes much easier. | Ser and Estar (Languages) |
| 9 | Anaerobic exercise works in a different way, and the word anaerobic means without oxygen. It is a short, powerful burst of movement followed by a rest, and during that burst, your muscles need more energy than your body can make with the oxygen it has on hand. Lifting a heavy weight, jumping as high as you can and sprinting at full speed are all examples. Your muscles can work this hard for only a short time before they need a break. That is why, after a hard sprint, you find yourself breathing deeply and quickly even though you have already stopped running. Your body is catching up on the oxygen that it could not deliver while you were in the middle of the burst. | Energy for Moving: Aerobic and Anaerobic (Move) |
| 10 | But the lock has a limit that many people miss. It means the connection is encrypted, not that the site is honest. The FTC warns that scammers create fake websites and encrypt them too, so that they look safe when they are not. If you visit a scam site, your data may be scrambled on its way there, but once it arrives it is in the scammers' hands. So the lock answers only one question: whether strangers along the way can read what you send. Other questions still matter. Is the address spelled correctly, did you arrive from a trusted link, and does a grown-up agree that the site is real? Checking those things, and asking before you type any personal information, is what really keeps you safe. | Encryption and the Lock Icon (Online) |
| 11 | What do radio signals, rainbows and X-rays have in common? They are all forms of electromagnetic radiation, which is energy that travels as waves made of changing electric and magnetic fields. Like a ripple spreading out across a pond, an electromagnetic wave has crests, or high points, with low points in between them. The distance from one crest to the next is called the wavelength. The number of crests that pass a given point every second is called the frequency, and it is measured in hertz, where one hertz means one wave each second. Wavelength and frequency are tied together: when the waves are long, fewer crests pass by each second, so the frequency is low, and when the waves are short, many more crests pass by, so the frequency is high. Unlike sound waves or ocean waves, these waves need no material at all to travel through, which is why sunlight can cross the empty space between the Sun and Earth. | Waves and Light (Science) |
| 12 | Intaglio printing works in exactly the opposite way, because the ink that forms the picture sits below the surface of the plate rather than on top of it. In engraving, an artist pushes a sharp, wedge-shaped steel tool called a burin through a metal plate to cut clean grooves. In etching, the artist first coats the plate with a layer of wax that resists acid, scratches a drawing through that layer with a needle, and then dips the plate into acid, which eats into the bare metal along the lines; the longer the plate stays in the acid, the deeper the lines become. To print, ink is rubbed into the grooves, the flat surface is wiped clean, and a roller press squeezes damp paper into the lines with a force of several tons. Because so much pressure is needed, nearly all intaglio plates are printed on a roller press instead of by hand. | Making Prints (Art) |
| 13 | Gates can be combined to perform addition. When you add two single binary digits, there are four possible cases: 0 plus 0 is 0, 0 plus 1 and 1 plus 0 are both 1, and 1 plus 1 is 2, which binary writes as 10, meaning a sum digit of 0 with a 1 carried into the next column. Look carefully and you will notice that the carry digit is 1 only when both inputs are 1, which is precisely the AND rule. The sum digit is 1 only when exactly one input is 1, a rule that can be assembled from the three basic gates as (A OR B) AND NOT (A AND B). This small circuit, which engineers call a half adder, handles a single column of the addition. Engineers extend the same idea into circuits that also accept a carry from the previous column, and connecting a long row of those lets a processor add lengthy binary numbers using nothing more than combinations of AND, OR and NOT. | Logic Gates (Code & Robots) |
Each fact is a page from one of Peabody's World trails, which carry named sources; this one cites Encyclopaedia Britannica: dynamics in music, how loud or soft it is played; beat, the steady pulse.
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
- Yesterday's word and fact
- Vocabulary games, which ask these words
- Free stories at every reading level
- Every day so far
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 25 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.