Word and fact of the day: Sunday, October 18, 2026

Peabody's word of the day for October 18, 2026 is "tumble" (fall and roll over) at level 2, up to "magnanimous" 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 18 October 2026

Level	Word of the day	What it means	In a sentence
2	tumble	fall and roll over	The puppy tumbles down the grassy hill.
3	hover	stay in one place in the air	The hummingbird hovers by the flower.
4	devour	eat up hungrily and quickly	The hungry rabbit devoured a whole row of lettuce.
5	multiply	grow in number	Rabbits multiply quickly.
6	effervescent	bubbly and fizzy	The effervescent lemonade tickled my nose.
7	metamorphosis	a complete change of form	A tadpole's metamorphosis turns it into a frog.
8	magnanimous	generous and forgiving	The magnanimous champion shared her prize.

Fact of the day

Level	Fact	From
1	A soft push makes it go slow.	Push and Pull (Workshop)
2	A list of steps for a robot is a program. Someone who writes them is a coder. You can be a coder too!	One Step at a Time (Code & Robots)
3	What makes a healthy plate? Your body needs many kinds of food to grow and stay strong. Foods are sorted into five groups. They are fruits, vegetables, grains, protein foods and dairy. Each group gives your body something different that it needs.	The Five Food Groups (Health)
4	Now you can tell people about your own family. To say that you have a brother, say Tengo un hermano. Tengo means I have. Think about the people who live with you and the people you visit. Then try to name each of them in Spanish, one at a time. A friend or a teacher who speaks Spanish would be happy to hear you try, and they can help you say even more.	La Familia (Languages)
5	Many songs are written in 4/4 time, which means there are four beats in every measure. In 4/4 time, a whole note fills an entire measure, so it is held for all four beats. A half note gets two beats, and a quarter note gets one beat. Two eighth notes share a single beat, so each one lasts only half a beat. Musicians often count eighth notes out loud by saying one-and, two-and, three-and, four-and.	Note Values (Music)
6	Why does a rolling ball slow down and stop? Something is pushing back on it, even though you cannot see the push. A push or a pull is called a force, and forces can make things start to move, speed up, slow down, stop or turn. When a ball rolls across grass, the grass rubs against it, and this rubbing force is called friction. Friction works against motion, so it slows the ball a little at a time until it stops. On smooth ice there is much less friction, which is why a hockey puck can slide such a long way. Air pushes back on moving things too, and that push is called air resistance.	Forces and Motion (Workshop)
7	In 1569, a mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator published a famous world map for sailors. On his map, a straight line keeps the same compass direction the whole way, which helped ships hold a steady course across the ocean. But to make that work, Mercator had to stretch lands more and more the farther they are from the equator. Close to the poles, the stretching becomes enormous. On a Mercator map, Greenland looks about as big as Africa. In reality, Africa is about fourteen times bigger than Greenland. Alaska, Canada and Russia also appear much larger than they really are.	Maps That Stretch (Geography)
8	This shows the connection between risk and reward. Risk is the chance of losing some or all of your money, and reward is what you might gain. In general, investments that could earn more also come with more risk, while safer choices tend to earn less. One way people reduce risk is diversification, which means spreading money across many different investments instead of putting it all in one place. If one company has a bad year, others may still do fine. Diversification can lower risk, but it cannot remove it completely. The right mix depends on a person's goals and how long they can wait, which is why families often talk these choices over with a trusted adult.	Saving, Investing and Risk (Money)
9	How does a photo travel from one computer to another across the world? It does not travel in one piece. Code.org explains that every message sent through the internet gets chopped up, and each piece is wrapped in its own kind of envelope. These pieces are called packets, which are small chunks of information formed from a larger chunk. Each packet is labeled with the address of the computer it came from and the address of the computer it is going to, a little like the sender and the receiver written on a letter. Those addresses are called IP addresses. An IP address is a number given to every device that is connected to the internet, so each packet always carries the information it needs to find its way.	How the Internet Moves Data (Online)
10	Most of a cell's DNA stays inside the nucleus, which is the cell's control center, but proteins are put together outside of it. So the cell first makes a working copy of the one gene that it needs, and this important copying step is called transcription. The DNA ladder unzips along that gene, and a matching strand of a related molecule, called messenger RNA, is built along one side by following the same pairing rule. RNA uses almost the same alphabet as DNA, with one difference: in place of T, it uses a base called uracil, or U, which pairs with A. When the messenger RNA is finished, it travels out of the nucleus through tiny openings, carrying the message of the gene to the place in the cell where proteins are made, much as a letter carries a message from one house to another.	From DNA to Protein (Science)
11	The Cubists rejected the old idea that a painting should copy nature, and they set aside traditional tools such as perspective and smooth shading. Instead, they broke objects apart into flat geometric pieces and then rearranged those pieces within a shallow space, showing several viewpoints in one picture. The result can look like a puzzle that was taken apart and then put back together in a new way. Imagine walking all the way around a guitar, looking at it from the front, from the side and from above, and then combining everything you noticed into a single image. Their favorite subjects were everyday things on a table, including bottles, glasses, newspapers, playing cards and musical instruments, along with the human face. In the earlier phase, called Analytic Cubism, the pictures became so broken up that they were mostly overlapping planes in quiet browns, grays and blacks.	Cubism (Art)
12	How does the undo button know which change to take back first? Many programs keep a record of your changes in a stack. The NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures defines a stack as a collection of items in which only the most recently added item may be removed, an arrangement also known as last in, first out, or LIFO. Adding an item is called pushing it onto the stack, and removing the top item is called popping it, so the only item you can ever reach directly is the one most recently added. Picture a pile of cafeteria trays: a worker sets a clean tray on top, and the next person in line takes that very tray from the top. So when you type three words and then press undo, the editor pops the most recent change first, and the last word you typed is the first one to disappear from the screen.	Stacks and Queues (Code & Robots)
13	Fortunately, the imperfect is one of the most regular forms in the entire language, so it requires remarkably little memorization. For words like hablar, the endings are built on -aba, so you get hablaba, hablabas and hablábamos, while for words like comer and vivir, the endings are built on -ía instead, which gives comía and vivía. You will notice that the form for I and the form for he or she are exactly the same, which means that the rest of the sentence, or a word like yo or ella, has to show who is meant; only a few words break the pattern in this tense, and two of the most important are ser, which becomes era, and ir, which becomes iba. The word estar, by contrast, is completely regular here, so it simply becomes estaba, even though it is irregular in the preterite, where it becomes estuvo.	Preterite or Imperfect? (Languages)

Each fact is a page from one of Peabody's World trails, which carry named sources; this one cites Encyclopaedia Britannica: force, a push or a pull that can change how a thing moves.

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 18 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.