environment

Plural: environments

Noun

• the totality of surrounding conditions
  • "he longed for the comfortable environment of his living room"
• the area in which something exists or lives
• The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
• The natural world or ecosystem.
• All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
• A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
• The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.
• 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.
• The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.

Examples

• That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.

Synonyms

environs, surround, surroundings, domain, ecosystem, surrounding, umbworld

Related Words

environ, environmentalism, environmentalist