Definition: Environment
From New World Encyclopedia
Etymology
From Middle French environnement, equivalent to environ + -ment. Compare French environnement.
Noun
environment (plural environments)
- 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.
- (computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.
- That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.
- (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.
- (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
- environ
- environmentalism
- environmentalist
Credits
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