Environment

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ɪnˈvaɪɹə(n)mɨnt/, /ɪnˈvaɪɚ(n)mɨnt/

Origin

As if environ + -ment; compare to French environnement

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Full definition of environment

Noun

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
2. The natural world or ecosystem.
• 2013-06-07, David Simpson, Fantasy of navigation, It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in the basket 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 over which a designer has no control and 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.

Related terms

• environ
• environmentalist
• environmentalism