Also note: That Python ideas thread that xtreak linked ( https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2015-February/031748.html ) largely rejected the proposal a couple weeks before PEP 448 was approved. At the time, the proposal wasn't just about +/+=; that was the initial proposal, but operator overloading was heavily criticized for the failure to adhere to either addition or concatenation semantics, so alternate constructors and top-level functions similar to sorted were proposed as alternatives (e.g. merged(dicta, dictb)). The whole thread ended up being about creating an approved, built-in way of one-lining: d3 = d1.copy(); d3.update(d2)

A key quote though is that this was needed because there was no other option without rolling your own merged function. Andrew Barnert summarized it best:

"I'm +1 on constructor, +0.5 on a function (whether it's called updated or merged, whether it's in builtins or collections), +0.5 on both constructor and function, -0.5 on a method, and -1 on an operator.

"Unless someone is seriously championing PEP 448 for 3.5, in which case I'm -0.5 on anything, because it looks like PEP 448 would already give us one obvious way to do it, and none of the alternatives are sufficiently nicer than that way to be worth having another."

As it happens, PEP 448 was put in 3.5, and we got the one obvious way to do it.

Side-note: It occurs to me there will be one more "way to do it" in 3.8 already, thanks to PEP 572:

(d3 := d1.copy()).update(d2)

I think I'll stick with d3 = {**d1, **d2} though. :-)