Environment

//ɪnˈvaɪ.ɹə.mənt// noun

Definitions

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

  2. 2
    the area in which something exists or lives wordnet
  3. 3
    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
    the totality of surrounding conditions wordnet
  5. 5
    All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
Show 4 more definitions
  1. 6
    A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
  2. 7
    The software or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

    "That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment."

  3. 8
    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.
  4. 9
    The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.

Etymology

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

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