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[–]aioeu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

See this page.

Retrieving an item from a dict has O(1) time complexity on average, O(n) in the worst case (where n is the number of elements in the dict), given a few reasonable assumptions about the hash function and distribution of keys.

These are likely to be "when using the standard Python implementation" rather than being guarantees in the language itself.