environment

From Middle French environnement, equivalent to environ +‎ -ment. Compare French environnement.

• IPA^(key): /ɪnˈvaɪɹə(n)mɪnt/, /ɪnˈvaɪɚ(n)mɪnt/

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environment (plural environments)

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
2. The natural world or ecosystem.
   • 2013 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36:

     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. (computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

   That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.

6. (programming) 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. (computing) The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.

• umbworld

• working environment

• environ
• environmentalist
• environmentalism

• environment in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• environment in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
• environment at OneLook Dictionary Search