Another way to deduplicate a list while preserving the original order is to use the collections.OrderedDict data structure. OrderedDict is a special kind of a dictionary data structure in Python, that remembers the order of key insertion. >>> from collections import OrderedDict >>> names = ['Bob', 'Stacy', 'Sarah', 'Jim', 'Stacy', 'Jim'] >>> unique = list(OrderedDict.fromkeys(names)) >>> unique ['Bob', 'Stacy', 'Sarah', 'Jim']