Method

An object's abilities. Lassie, being a Dog, has the ability to bark. So bark() is one of Lassie's methods. She may have other methods as well, for example sit() or eat(). Within the program, using a method should only affect one particular object; all Dogs can bark, but you need one particular dog to do the barking.

In object-oriented programming, the term method refers to a subroutine that is exclusively associated either with a class (called class methods, static methods, or factory methods) or with an object (called instance methods). Like a procedure in procedural programming languages, a method usually consists of a sequence of statements to perform an action, a set of input parameters to customize those actions, and possibly an output value (called return value) of some kind. The purpose of methods is to provide a mechanism for accessing (for both reading and writing) the private data stored in an object or a class.