What we just showed you was hash literal notation. We call it that because you literally describe what you want in the hash: you give it a name and you set it equal to one or more key => value pairs inside curly braces.

You can also create a hash using Hash.new, like so:

my_hash = Hash.new

Setting a variable equal to Hash.new creates a new, empty hash; it’s the same as setting the variable equal to empty curly braces ({}).