Now then children! :)
Also, it all has nothing to do with accessing members of a structured type, as PodPerson would have you believe. Structure (type) members can be accessed directly by using an offset from the base of the structure, which is determined at _compile time_ because the compiler knows the size of the types in the structure. A custom type is probably stored as a pointer, rather than directly in the structure, so this has to be dereferenced to get to the actual storage for the object, but that applies to custom types outside structures as well.
De-referencing refers to the act of accessing something through a pointer to that thing, at runtime. A virtual method table is a list of function pointers. A method is called by de-referencing this pointer to get to the actual address of the code to be performed.
Also, it all has nothing to do with accessing members of a structured type, as PodPerson would have you believe. Structure (type) members can be accessed directly by using an offset from the base of the structure, which is determined at _compile time_ because the compiler knows the size of the types in the structure. A custom type is probably stored as a pointer, rather than directly in the structure, so this has to be dereferenced to get to the actual storage for the object, but that applies to custom types outside structures as well.
De-referencing refers to the act of accessing something through a pointer to that thing, at runtime. A virtual method table is a list of function pointers. A method is called by de-referencing this pointer to get to the actual address of the code to be performed.