invoke

verb

Etymology: From Middle English *invoken, envoken, borrowed from Old French envoquer, from Latin invocāre (“to call upon”), itself from in- + vocare (“to call”). Doublet of invocate.

1. To call upon (a person, a god) for help, assistance or guidance.
2. To solicit, petition for, appeal to a favorable attitude.

   “The envoy invoked the King of Kings's magnanimity to reduce his province's tribute after another drought.”

   “Whatever the pressures that have invoked the Minister's diktat, the outcome is Gilbertian.”

3. To call another ship.
4. To call to mind (something) for some purpose.

   “After marriage, the man had anciently (but this was anterior to Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could invoke no law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law.”

   “The acquisition of a useless part can hardly be said to raise an organism in the natural scale; and in the case of the imperfect, closed flowers, above described, if any new principle has to be invoked, it must be one of retrogression rather than of progression; and so it must be with many parasitic and degraded animals.”

5. To appeal for validation to a (notably cited) authority.

   “In certain Christian circles, invoking the Bible constitutes irrefutable proof.”

   “He invoked cadaveric poisoning as the reason for the high death rate among priests and monks […]”

6. To conjure up with incantations.

   “This satanist ritual invokes Beelzebub.”

7. To bring about as an inevitable consequence.

   “Blasphemy is taboo as it may invoke divine wrath.”

8. To cause (a program or subroutine) to execute.

   “Interactive programs let the users enter choices and invoke the corresponding routines.”

   “[…]the selling price and cost of a particular item are derived by the system through a table lookup and assigned to the item at invoking time.”