Word and fact of the day: Friday, October 23, 2026

Peabody's word of the day for October 23, 2026 is "chilly" (a little bit cold) at level 2, up to "halcyon" 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 23 October 2026

Level	Word of the day	What it means	In a sentence
2	chilly	a little bit cold	It is chilly, so wear a hat.
3	loyal	always true to your friends	My loyal dog waits for me after school.
4	soothe	make calm or less sore	Mom's song soothed the crying baby.
5	colossal	huge, like a giant statue	A colossal iceberg floated past the ship.
6	rejuvenate	make fresh and young again	The rain rejuvenated the dry fields.
7	imperceptible	too small or slight to notice	The change in her height was imperceptible.
8	halcyon	calm, happy, and peaceful	We remember the halcyon days of summer camp.

Fact of the day

Level	Fact	From
1	You can draw a line. It can be long.	Lines and Shapes (Art)
2	The order matters a lot! A wrong step sends the robot the wrong way. Then we fix that step and try again.	One Step at a Time (Code & Robots)
3	Where is Colorado? It is one of the fifty states in the United States. It is out in the West. Look at a map, and you will see that it is shaped almost like a rectangle. Its borders look like four straight lines. The capital city is Denver. That is where the leaders of the state meet to make the laws.	Colorado on the Map (Geography)
4	Towns grew fast where the miners came. Denver started as a small camp and grew into a busy city. Then the railroad came. In 1870, a train line reached Denver. Now people and goods could move much faster than by wagon. As more settlers came, many American Indian nations were forced off their lands, which brought great hardship.	Colorado Becomes a State (History)
5	Teammates cheer each other on, especially when someone makes a mistake. Saying nice try, or you will get it next time, helps a friend keep trying instead of giving up. Fair play also means treating the other team with respect. They are not enemies, but players who love the game too. When the game ends, both teams line up, shake hands or give high fives, and say good game. It is a kind way to end.	Teamwork and Fair Play (Move)
6	Newton's second law is about mass, which is how much matter, or stuff, an object has. The same push makes a light object speed up more than a heavy one, so an empty shopping cart is easy to get rolling, while a full cart takes a much harder push. To make a big mass speed up just as fast as a small one, you need a bigger force. Newton's third law says forces always come in pairs, so when you push on something, it pushes back on you just as hard, in the opposite direction. When a swimmer pushes on the wall of a pool, the wall pushes the swimmer away from it.	Forces and Motion (Workshop)
7	How do you say what people do in Spanish? Many action words, called verbs, end in -ar in their basic form, such as hablar, which means to speak, bailar, which means to dance, and cantar, which means to sing. This basic form is called the infinitive. To use one of these verbs in a sentence, you remove the -ar ending, which leaves the stem, such as habl. Then you add a new ending that matches the person doing the action. That ending is the key to the whole pattern, because it tells you who is speaking, dancing or singing, and learning this one pattern will help you say a great many things.	-ar Verbs (Languages)
8	Your body becomes stronger when you ask it to do slightly more than it is used to doing, and coaches call this idea overload. If you run for fifteen minutes every time, your heart, lungs and muscles gradually adapt, so the same run begins to feel easier. To keep improving, you might add a few more minutes or run at a slightly quicker pace. The important word is slightly. Experts suggest raising only one part of FITT at a time and increasing it gradually over several weeks, because adding too much too quickly is one of the most common causes of injury.	Train Smart (Move)
9	Two sets of rules, called protocols, make all of this work. The Internet Protocol, or IP, handles the addresses and moves packets from one network to the next. The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, sets up a connection between two computers, and according to NIST, it guarantees that the data is delivered and that packets arrive in the same order in which they were sent. If a packet goes missing, it is sent again. Together these rules are known as TCP/IP. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn created these protocols in the 1970s, and in 1983 the ARPANET, an early network that helped lead to today's internet, switched over to TCP/IP. The same basic rules still carry your messages today.	How the Internet Moves Data (Online)
10	If a statement is true, is it still true when you flip it around? Logic, the study of correct reasoning, gives a careful answer to that question. A conditional statement has the form if p, then q, where the first part, p, is called the hypothesis and the second part, q, is called the conclusion. Consider the true statement, if an animal is a dog, then it is a mammal, in which p is the animal is a dog and q is the animal is a mammal. A conditional makes only one promise, namely that whenever p is true, q must be true as well. It says nothing at all about what happens when p is false, so it is not contradicted by a cat, which is a mammal but not a dog. The only way to demonstrate that a conditional is false is to discover a single case in which p is true and q is false.	If, Then: Conditional Logic (Think)
11	Why would an artist paint a guitar from several sides at the same time? For about five hundred years, many European painters had followed the rules of perspective, showing every scene from one fixed point of view, as if through a single window. Early in the twentieth century, two young artists working in Paris decided to break those rules. They were Pablo Picasso, who came from Spain, and Georges Braque, who was French, and between 1907 and 1914 they created a style called Cubism. Picasso's large painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, finished in 1907 and now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is often named as the starting point. The name came from a French art critic, Louis Vauxcelles, who looked at the landscapes Braque painted in 1908 and described their geometric forms as cubes.	Cubism (Art)
12	Both structures can be built on top of a simpler one, the array, which stores items in numbered positions, usually starting at position 0. Choosing between a stack and a queue depends entirely on the order that a particular problem requires. Suppose you push A, then B, then C onto a stack; popping three times returns C, then B, then A, which is the reverse of the original order. Put the same three letters into a queue instead, and dequeuing three times returns A, then B, then C, exactly the original order. Data structures like these are tools for organizing information so that a program can do its job correctly and efficiently. The CSTA standards ask high school students to compare and contrast such fundamental data structures and their uses, because selecting the appropriate one can make a program simpler, faster and considerably easier for other people to understand.	Stacks and Queues (Code & Robots)
13	What does the Federal Reserve actually do? The Federal Reserve, usually called the Fed, is the central bank of the United States. Congress created it through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, intending to give the nation a monetary system that could respond more effectively to stresses in banking. In plain words, it is the bank that the whole country's money system leans on, and it has three main parts. The Board of Governors, located in Washington, D.C., is the governing body and is accountable to Congress. Twelve regional Reserve Banks, each serving its own geographic district, carry out much of the Fed's daily work across the country. The third part, the Federal Open Market Committee, makes the central decisions about monetary policy. Together these parts carry out five key functions: setting monetary policy, helping to keep the financial system steady, supervising and regulating banks and other financial firms, making sure that payments move safely and smoothly, and protecting consumers while supporting community development.	How the Federal Reserve Works (Money)

Each fact is a page from one of Peabody's World trails, which carry named sources; this one cites J. Paul Getty Museum, education: the elements of art (line, shape, color).

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 23 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.