10.1 Dictionary basics

Learning objectives

By the end of this section you should be able to

• Describe the structure of a dictionary object.
• Use type() to identify the type of a dictionary object.
• Explain why a dictionary object does not have duplicate key values.

Dictionaries

A dictionary in Python is a container object including key-value pairs. An example of a key-value item is a word in an English dictionary with its corresponding definition.

Dictionary type and properties

The dict type implements a dictionary in Python. Since a dictionary object is used to look up values using keys, a dictionary object cannot hold duplicate key values.