Definition: Environment

From New World Encyclopedia
(Redirected from Environment)

Etymology

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

Noun

environment (plural environments)

  1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
  2. The natural world or ecosystem.
  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.

Derived terms

  • antienvironment
  • bioenvironment
  • cyberenvironment
  • desktop environment
  • ecoenvironment
  • environmental
  • environment division
  • environment-friendly
  • environment variable
  • geoenvironment
  • hydroenvironment
  • macroenvironment
  • microenvironment
  • multienvironment
  • nanoenvironment
  • paleoenvironment
  • subenvironment
  • working environment

Related terms

Credits

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