environment

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   the totality of surrounding conditions

   We longed for the comfortable environment of home.

2. 2
   noun

   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 perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior.

3. 3
   noun

   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 separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment.

4. 4
   noun

   The software or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

   That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.

5. 5
   noun

   the area in which something exists or lives

6. 6
   noun

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

7. 7
   noun

   A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.

8. 8
   noun

   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.

Etymology

From Middle French environnement. Compare French environnement. By surface analysis, environ + -ment.