environment

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The circumstances or conditions that surround one; surroundings.
2. n. The totality of circumstances surrounding an organism or group of organisms, especially:
3. n. The combination of external physical conditions that affect and influence the growth, development, and survival of organisms: "We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism” ( Paul Brooks).
4. n. The complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of an individual or community.
5. n. Computer Science The entire set of conditions under which one operates a computer, as it relates to the hardware, operating platform, or operating system.
6. n. Computer Science An area of a computer's memory used by the operating system and some programs to store certain variables to which they need frequent access.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act of environing or surrounding, or the state of being environed.
2. n. That which environs; the aggregate of surrounding things or conditions.

Wiktionary

1. n. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
2. n. The natural world or ecosystem.
3. n. All the elements over which a designer has no control and that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
4. n. A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
5. n. computing The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.
6. n. 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. n. computing The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. Act of environing; state of being environed.
2. n. That which environs or surrounds; surrounding conditions, influences, or forces, by which living forms are influenced and modified in their growth and development.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the totality of surrounding conditions
2. n. the area in which something exists or lives