Word and fact of the day: Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Peabody's word of the day for October 28, 2026 is "glow" (give off a soft, steady light) at level 2, up to "vociferous" 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 28 October 2026

Level	Word of the day	What it means	In a sentence
2	glow	give off a soft, steady light	Fireflies glow in the dark garden.
3	ancient	very, very old	We saw ancient bones at the museum.
4	sparse	thinly spread out, not crowded	Trees are sparse on the windy hill.
5	tranquil	calm and peaceful	The tranquil lake had no ripples.
6	condense	turn from a gas into a liquid	Steam condenses on the cold mirror.
7	sonorous	deep, full, and rich in sound	The sonorous bell rang across town.
8	vociferous	loud and forceful in speaking	The vociferous crowd chanted the team's name.

Fact of the day

Level	Fact	From
1	You need food and water. You grow too!	What Plants Need (Science)
2	We tell the robot one step at a time. Go up, go right, then up again. The robot follows every step in order.	One Step at a Time (Code & Robots)
3	How do you tell a robot to do something again and again? You could tell it "go right" three times in a row. But coders have a shortcut. It is called a loop. A loop tells the robot to repeat the same steps a certain number of times.	Loops (Code & Robots)
4	High in the mountains runs a line you cannot see, called the Continental Divide. Rain and snow that fall on one side flow toward the Atlantic Ocean. Water that falls on the other side flows toward the Pacific Ocean. Some very big rivers start in the mountains of Colorado. The Colorado River flows toward the west. The Rio Grande flows south toward Mexico.	Colorado's Land (Geography)
5	Many people keep their savings in a bank, because a bank keeps money safe from loss or theft. A savings account at a bank can pay interest, which is a little extra money the bank gives you for keeping your money there. Suppose you put 100 dollars into a savings account, and it earns 2 dollars of interest in a year. After one year you would have 102 dollars. All you did was wait.	Banks, Budgets and Interest (Money)
6	If a list is sorted, you can use a faster plan called binary search. Sorted means the items are in order, like numbers going from smallest to largest. First you look at the item in the middle, and if it is the number you want, you are done. If your number is smaller, you can skip the whole upper half, where the bigger numbers are, and if it is larger, you skip the lower half. Then you look at the middle of the part that is left. Each check cuts the list about in half, a bit like opening a dictionary near the middle and flipping toward the right letter.	Searching Smart (Code & Robots)
7	The same endings work for every regular -ar verb, so once you know one, you know many. Yo bailo means I dance, and nosotros cantamos means we sing. Because each ending already shows who is doing the action, Spanish speakers often leave out the subject word. You can say Bailo instead of Yo bailo, and everyone still understands that you mean I dance. The present tense also covers actions happening right now, so Canto can mean I sing or I am singing. Try saying the forms of cantar out loud while you sing along to a song that you like.	-ar Verbs (Languages)
8	What is sound, and how does it travel from a guitar to your ears? Every sound begins with a vibration, which is a rapid back-and-forth movement. When you pluck a guitar string, it shakes very quickly, pushing on the air molecules beside it and squeezing them together, then pulling back and spreading them apart. Those molecules bump into their neighbors, which bump into theirs, passing the pattern along. This traveling pattern of squeezes and stretches is called a sound wave. The air itself does not rush across the room; only the wave of energy moves. When the wave reaches you, it makes your eardrum vibrate too, and your brain hears it as sound.	How Sound Works (Music)
9	Mendeleev started a new row each time the pattern began again, so that elements that behave alike landed in the same column. Today the rows are called periods and the columns are called groups. Elements in the same group share a lot of the same properties, which means they look and act in many of the same ways. For example, lithium, sodium and potassium sit together in the first column, and all three are soft metals that react strongly with water. Mendeleev's boldest move was to leave gaps in his table. He said the empty spots belonged to elements that nobody had found yet, and he even told what those elements would be like. When gallium was found in 1875 and germanium in 1886, they fit what he had said very closely, and other chemists began to trust his table.	The Periodic Table (Science)
10	The third rearrangement, called the contrapositive, both exchanges the parts and adds not to each one, giving if an animal is not a mammal, then it is not a dog. This statement is true, and it will always agree with the original. A conditional and its contrapositive are logically equivalent, which means that in every possible case they are either both true or both false. Here is the reason: if every dog is a mammal, then anything that fails to be a mammal cannot possibly be a dog. The same reasoning works for any conditional whatsoever. Suppose we know that whenever it rains, the sidewalk gets wet. The contrapositive tells us that if the sidewalk is dry, then it is not raining. Detectives, programmers and mathematicians use contrapositives constantly to reason backward from what they observe to what must be true.	If, Then: Conditional Logic (Think)
11	Many English classes follow the style of the Modern Language Association, known as MLA style, for giving credit. In this style, an in-text citation places the author's last name and the page number in parentheses immediately after the borrowed material, as in (Rivera 42). If a signal phrase already names the author, only the page number goes in the parentheses. Every in-text citation points to a complete entry on the works cited page, a separate list at the end of the paper that gives each source's author, title and publication details. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order by the authors' last names. Each one also uses a hanging indent, which means that every line after the first is indented half an inch. Together, these citations allow any reader to find every source and check your work.	Quoting, Paraphrasing and Citing (Write)
12	A receiver, like the one inside a phone, does not send anything to the satellites. It simply listens for their signals. When a signal arrives, the receiver compares the time it was sent with the time it arrived, which gives the signal's travel time. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, about 300,000 kilometers per second, so the receiver can calculate its distance from the satellite with a familiar formula: distance equals speed multiplied by time. A signal that took 0.07 seconds to arrive, for example, came from about 21,000 kilometers away. Because light covers about 30 centimeters, roughly one foot, in a billionth of a second, even a tiny timing error produces a large mistake in distance, which is why the satellites' clocks are regularly corrected using even more accurate atomic clocks on the ground. Without those corrections, small errors would build up quickly, and the whole system would soon become useless for finding anything precisely.	How GPS Finds You (Geography)
13	The FOMC's main tool is a target range for the federal funds rate, which the Fed defines as an interest rate for overnight borrowing by banks. A change in that target normally brings changes in other interest rates and in financial conditions more broadly, and those changes in turn influence how much households and businesses decide to spend. Lowering the target is described as easing, and it is accompanied by lower short-term interest rates in financial markets. Raising the target is described as tightening, a step the Fed says may be needed if the economy is overheating or inflation is too high. Economists, lawmakers and members of the public frequently disagree about exactly what the Fed should do at any particular moment, and people who study the same facts can still come to different views. This trail explains how the system is organized and how its tools work, and it takes no side on any decision or official.	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 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 here are the grade-sized steps of Peabody's word and fact banks, not the reading levels 0 to 18; 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 your child's grade. Level 2 is about 2nd grade 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 28 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.