environment — English Dictionary

Noun

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   What was seen from the top down, as a large environment with many difficult trade-offs, is instead seen from the bottom up--as 10 million microenvironments, each to be regulated in its own right. It is this inversion of perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior.

2. The natural world or ecosystem.

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […]; […]; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment.

3. All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.

4. A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.

5. The software or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

   Examples

   That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.

6. The environment of a function at a point during the execution of a program is the set of identifiers in the function's scope and their bindings at that point.

7. The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.

Noun

1. the totality of surrounding conditions

   Broader terms

   situationstate of affairs

   Examples

   he longed for the comfortable environment of his living room

2. the area in which something exists or lives

   Synonyms

   environssurroundingssurround

   Broader terms

   geographical areageographic areageographical regiongeographic region

   Examples

   the country — the flat agricultural surround