The first application we are going to build is a dictionary. An interactive dictionary. Now, what the dictionary will do? It will retrieve the definition for the word which user has entered, that’s what dictionaries do, right? In addition to that, if the user has made a typo while entering a word, our program will suggest the closest word saying ‘did you mean this instead?’, and if the word has more than one definition, retrieve all of them. Doesn’t seem that easy now, huh? Let’s find out.

I have come to see that most new python programmers have a hard time figuring out the *args and **kwargs magic variables. So what are they ? First of all let me tell you that it is not necessary to write *args or **kwargs. Only the * (asterisk) is necessary. You could have also written *var and **vars. Writing *args and **kwargs is just a convention.

The special syntax, *args and **kwargs in function definitions is used to pass a variable number of arguments to a function. The single asterisk form *args is used to pass a non-keyworded, variable-length argument list, and the double asterisk form is used to pass a keyworded, variable-length argument list. Here is an example of how to use the non-keyworded form. So now lets take a look at *args first.