Python’s dictionaries are implemented as resizable hash tables. Compared to B-trees, this gives better performance for lookup (the most common operation by far) under most circumstances, and the implementation is simpler.
Dictionaries work by computing a hash code for each key stored in the dictionary using the hash() built-in function. The hash code varies widely depending on the key; for example, “Python” hashes to -539294296 while “python”, a string that differs by a single bit, hashes to 1142331976. The hash code is then used to calculate a location in an internal array where the value will be stored. Assuming that you’re storing keys that all have different hash values, this means that dictionaries take constant time – O(1), in computer science notation – to retrieve a key. It also means that no sorted order of the keys is maintained, and traversing the array as the.keys() and .items() do will output the dictionary’s content in some arbitrary jumbled order.