The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
method invocation
invoking a method
In object-oriented programming, the way the
program looks up the right code to run when a method with a
given name is called ("invoked") on an object. The method is
first looked for in the object's class, then that class's
superclass and so on up the class hierarchy until a method
with the given name is found (the name is "resolved").
Generally, method lookup cannot be performed at compile time
because the object's class is not known until run time. This is
the case for an object method whereas a class method is just
an ordinary function (that is bundled with a given class) and can
be resolved at compile time (or load time in the case of a
dynamically loaded library).
(2014-09-06)