The problem here is that while the historical issue is real, new programmers will come and they won't see a "non-ordered" dict, and having this "dictionaries" vs "ordered dictionaries" that aren't actual OrderedDict objects (which have the common name "ordered dictionaries", though), will be really confusing for them.

A dictionary (treated as a synonym for dict) can't have an order different than insertion order, because that is one of the guarantees a *dictionary* provides. If one needs to have an object with another sort of ordering, then we talk about a dict-like object, or a dict subclass; but IMHO "dictionary" alone should imply not only a very specific order, but a very specific type too: dict. A dict subclass with different ordering is nothing but that, not a dictionary with different ordering, that would imply one can setup the ordering method of a dict class.

Plus, ordered dictionaries (OrderedDict objects) don't provide exactly the same API as dictionaries, so it gets tricky to use that term to also include dictionaries. It's quite reasonable to expect "ordered dictionaries" to be confused with "OrderedDict objects".

Also, I feel somewhat uncomfortable about "most likely". It's fine to use weak names (dict-like, subclass of dict, mapping, etc.), but not knowing exactly what you can *rely on* (i.e. a required subset of whatever the implementation actually provides) from a given API is quite confusing. Notice that it doesn't have to be an actual type, but at least some sort of description of what is guaranteed (i.e. a mapping).