Definition
In general legal usage, a method is a process, procedure, or mode of operation by which a particular result is achieved. The term appears across multiple legal contexts, but its most developed and technically precise usage arises in patent law.
In patent law specifically, a method (also called a process) is a series of steps or operations performed in a particular order or manner to achieve a desired result. It is one of the four statutory categories of patentable subject matter under U.S. law — alongside machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. A method patent protects the way something is done, not necessarily the physical device or product that results. Two inventors may independently develop different methods for achieving the same end, and both methods may be separately patentable so long as the modes of attaining the desired effect are essentially different.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A process by which a task is completed; a way of doing something. Also used in computing to describe a subroutine or function belonging to a class or object.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An orderly procedure or process; regular manner of doing anything. Orderly arrangement or systematic development.
The everyday sense of method — any organized way of doing something — is broad and informal. In patent law, the term carries a precise technical meaning: a defined sequence of steps that constitutes patentable subject matter. A researcher who reads "method" in a patent document, claim, or infringement case should not assume the ordinary meaning applies. The legal question is whether the claimed steps are novel, non-obvious, and sufficiently definite — a much narrower inquiry than whether something is simply an organized way of proceeding.
Common Confusion
Method and machine are frequently treated as synonymous in early patent sources, including both editions of Black's. That equation ("engine and method mean the same thing") reflects a formative period in patent jurisprudence when the categories of patentable subject matter were not yet sharply differentiated. Modern patent law treats them as distinct: a machine is a physical apparatus; a method is a sequence of steps. The two may overlap — a machine may embody a patented method — but they are analyzed separately. Researchers reading 18th- and 19th-century patent materials should not assume modern categorical distinctions were operative.
Method and process are often used interchangeably in patent law and in the statutory text. For most research purposes, the terms are functional equivalents. Some sources use "process" in the statutory sense and "method" as the claim-drafting convention; the distinction is rarely outcome-determinative.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research significance of method is in patent law, and the most important navigational point is chronological: the boundaries of what constitutes a patentable method have shifted substantially over time.
Early sources — including all four historical dictionaries represented here — treat method largely in mechanical or manufacturing terms. Bouvier's framing, that a method is "the mode of operating or the means of attaining an object," reflects a 19th-century conception tied to tangible industrial processes. Researchers working in that period will find method and machine conflated, as Black's explicitly does.
Modern patent doctrine has expanded the concept considerably. Software-implemented methods, business methods, and diagnostic methods have all been the subject of significant legal development — and significant controversy. A researcher tracing the patentability of a particular type of method across time will need to account for the categorical instability in older sources.
Outside patent law, method appears in procedural and evidentiary contexts (methods of service, methods of valuation, methods of calculating fees) where the term carries no special technical weight. In those contexts it is essentially synonymous with its common meaning. The research trap is assuming that a specialized patent-law analysis applies whenever the word method appears in a legal document — it usually does not.
Corpus researchers should also note that method appears frequently as a modifier in compound phrases (method claim, method patent, method of service, lodestar method, valuation method) where the relevant doctrine is carried by the full phrase, not the word method alone. Searching for method in isolation will produce false positives across unrelated areas.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four historical sources are in close agreement on the core point: a method can be the subject of a patent, and it refers to the ordering or performance of operations to achieve a result. Black's (both editions) and Anderson's share nearly identical language, and all four sources converge on Bouvier's formulation that the mode of attaining a result may be independently patentable even when the result itself is the same as another patent.
Black's (both editions) draws on Hornblower v. Boulton, 8 Term R. 106, for the proposition that engine and method mean the same thing — a holding from English common law that reflects pre-modern patent categories. Anderson's quotes Webster's Dictionary as authority for the definition, which is unusual and signals that the legal term had not yet fully separated from its ordinary meaning in that source's era.
None of the historical sources address the question of abstract methods, software methods, or process patents in the modern doctrinal sense. This is an expected gap given their dates of compilation. Researchers should treat the historical dictionaries as useful for 19th-century patent disputes and for understanding the foundational proposition that methods are patentable subject matter, but not as reliable guides to the boundaries of that category under current law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia: The Lodestar Method and Calculation of Reasonable Attorneys' Fees (civpro_139) — for method as a term of art in fee-calculation doctrine.
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia: Discharge — Overview (Methods of Discharge) (contracts_65) — for method in the context of contract termination and performance.
The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia: Marital Property — Valuation Methods and Date of Valuation (family_29) — for method as applied in property division and expert valuation contexts.