If you go to your python installed location, you will find that in the python library, tkinter is a folder instead of a .py file. So when you use from tkinter import *, you actually only imported things in your-python-location/lib/tkinter/__init__.py. Things like ttk are actually separate files in tkinter folder(e.g. lib/tkinter/ttk.py, lib/tkinter/scrolledtext.py etc.) Therefore, from tkinter import * and from tkinter import tkk are different commands that import things from different module.