environment
nounUK /ɪnˈvaɪ.ɹə.mənt/ · US /ɪnˈvaɪ.ɚn.mənt/
Etymology From Middle French environnement. Compare French environnement. By surface analysis, environ + -ment.
7 senses
- 1The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular…
- 2The natural world or ecosystem.
- 3All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
- 4A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
- 5The software or hardware existing on any particular…
- 6The environment of a function at a point during the…
- 7The set of variables and their values in a namespace…
The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
- 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:
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 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36:
All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences The software or hardware existing on any particular computer system.
- That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Programming, Sciences 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, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.
- Synonyms
- domain, ecosystem, surrounding, umbworld
- Derived terms
32 terms
agroenvironment, antienvironment, bioenvironment, cryoenvironment, cyberenvironment, ecoenvironment, environmetrics, geoenvironment, hydroenvironment, macroenvironment, microenvironment, multienvironment, nanoenvironment, paleoenvironment, photoenvironment, socioenvironment, subenvironment, environmentability, environmental, environmentology, built environment, desktop environment, environmental storytelling, environment division, environment-friendly, environment mapping, environment variable, hostile environment, player versus environment, space environment, work environment, working environment- Related terms
- environ, environmentalism, environmentalist