In early 2004, Martin Fowler asked the readers of his site: when talking about Inversion of Control: "the question, is what aspect of control are they inverting?". After talking about the term Inversion of Control Martin suggests renaming the pattern, or at least giving it a more self-explanatory name, and starts to use the term Dependency Injection. His article continues to explain some of the ideas behind Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection. If you need a decent insight: http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html.