environment

Etymology

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

noun

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
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 separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment. 2013-06-07, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36
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.