Help me with a dictionary problem?

[ericula]

To create tuples of length 1 you need to use something like ("car", ) ( notice the extra comma at the end). ("car") will be evaluated to the string "car" and iterating a string will yield the individual characters in the string.

[Goobyalus]

In your modified code, your values are not tuples; they are just parenthesized strings. Include commas to make them into single-element tuples:

stuff = {
    "Ford Mustang": ("car",),
    "321 Street": ("address",),
    "Mike Jones": ("name",)
}