meta is all relative and means 'beyond'. A metaclass being a class, it can itself have a metaclass, and so on, and they are all only objects, where the author's

meta is all relative and means 'beyond'. A metaclass being a class, it can itself have a metaclass, and so on, and they are all only objects, where the author's following excerpt embodies: MyClass = MetaClass() MyObject = MyClass() Those two code blocks are effectively equivalent: class Quux(type): #__metaclass__ = type is implicit pass class Qux(object): __metaclass__ = Quux pass and: Quux = type('Quux', (type,), {}) Qux = Quux('Qux', (object,), {}) the __metaclass__ attribute merely puts in words what's the callable being called when the keyword class gets parsed and subsequently handled in the current namespace. This class/object unification is one of a bunch of unifications I find extremely satisfying when thinking about how Python ticks.