Dictionary Definition

environment

1 the totality of surrounding conditions; "he longed for the comfortable environment of his livingroom"

2 the area in which something exists or lives; "the country--the flat agricultural surround" [syn: environs, surroundings, surround]

User Contributed Dictionary

The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
The natural world or ecosystem.
All the elements over which a designer has no control and that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
In the context of "computing": The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.
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.

area around something

Croatian: okruženje
Czech: prostředí, okolí
Dutch: omgeving
French: environnement
Finnish: ympäristö
German: Umgebung, Umwelt
Greek: περιβάλλον (perivállon)
Hungarian: környezet, környék
Italian: ambiente
Japanese: 環境 (かんきょう, kankyō)
Polish: środowisko
Portuguese: meio, ambiente
Russian: среда (sr'edá) , окружающая среда (okružájuš'aja sr'edá) , окружение (okružénije)
Spanish: ambiente, medio, entorno
Swedish: miljö, natur
Telugu: పర్యావరణం (paryaavaraNam)

natural world or ecosystem

political or social setting, arena or condition

software or hardware on a computer

Environment may refer to:

Environment (biophysical), the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism
Natural environment, all living and non-living things that occur naturally on Earth
Built environment, constructed surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging from the large-scale civic surroundings to the personal places
Social environment, the culture that an individual lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact
Environmental science, the study of the interactions among the physical, chemical and biological components of the environment
Environmental psychology
Environmental determinism
Environmental policy
Environmental quality
Environmental art

In computing:

Environment variable, the set of environments defined in a process
Runtime environment, a virtual machine state which provides software services for processes or programs while a computer is running
Integrated development environment, a type of computer software that assists computer programmers in developing software
Desktop environment, in computing, is graphical user interface to the computer