environment

plural environments

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.

   1 more example

   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.

   1998 September 19, Jonathan Rauch, “Tunnel Vision: The Dawn of Microgovernment”, in National Journal, archived from the original on 06 Mar 2012

2. The natural world or ecosystem.

   1 more example

   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 June 7, 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. computingThe software or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

   That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.

6. computingThe 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. computingThe set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.