environment

Noun

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
   • 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...
2. The natural world or ecosystem.
   • 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...
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.
   • 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.