There’s two definitions of “literal” in widespread use. The first definition is as you say: an expression that has a constant value. The second definition is:

There’s two definitions of “literal” in widespread use. The first definition is as you say: an expression that has a constant value. The second definition is: an expression that is the primary syntactic form to construct a type. For example: “array literals” construct arrays, but may contain arbitrary expressions within. The first definition is more common in low-level languages where there is a place in the compiled executable to put constant data. These languages might call the second form an initializer rather than a literal. But in a dynamic language such as Python the distinction is less important.