Why are curly braces used in Python to initialize an empty dictionary?

In Python, curly braces {} are used to create dictionaries because a dictionary is a data structure that stores key-value pairs, and the syntax with curly braces intuitively reflects this structure.

An empty dictionary is created exactly like this:

empty_dict = {}

This is convenient and concise, unlike using the dict() constructor, which also creates an empty dictionary but is less visually intuitive.

Curly braces in Python are also used to create sets, but an empty set is created using set(), because {} by default creates an empty dictionary.