The Python dictionary type (what other languages would call an associative array or a hash) is dict.
Often, you won't see dict used, as the empty literal {} is more concise than the empty constructor (as is the case with list, and conversions aren't that common. Come to think of it, non-empty dictionary literals are also easier than their constructor counterparts. Still, there is a useful constructor dict([(k0, v0), (k1, v1), ..., (kn, vn)]) from a list (iterator) of (key, value) pairs.
Although the keyword is "dict", the type is always referred to (in speech) as "dictionary". About the type itself, see dictionary.