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The comment is referring to the literal SortedMap class. In a SortedMap, the entries are sorted by their keys. A SortedMap initialized with your data will always have the order SortedMap(1 -> "a", 2 -> "b", 3 -> "c", 4 -> "d"), because that's the only way for the keys to be sorted. For a plain Map, the order is not guaranteed. In particular, for SortedMap, take respects ==: if xs == ys then xs.take(n) == ys.take(n). But for Map, your example shows that's not true. Since a Map is "supposed" to be an unordered collection of mappings, you're not supposed to depend on its "order". Notice that if you extend your maps to 6 elements, their order completely changes, because of implementation details of the library. It only makes sense to use take on a generic Map if you truly don't care which mappings you get out. E.g. it would be acceptable if you were "splitting" the map so you could operate on its pieces in parallel, or if you're "chunking" it so you can serialize it, but you can't use take for "logical" operations, like adding a bunch of mappings to a Map and expecting them to come back out in the order you put them in.