''environment'' ⚬ Entries

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''environment'' ⚬｜Definition｜1st｜20260511125642-00-⌔

environment - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

environment (plural environments)

• 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.¹
• 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.²
• All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
• A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
• (computing) The software 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.

Etymology

From Middle French environnement. Compare French environnement. By surface analysis, environ +‎ -ment.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ɪnˈvaɪ.ɹə.mənt/, /ɪnˈvaɪ.ɹən.mənt/
• Audio (UK): 🔊
• (General American) IPA: /ɪnˈvaɪ.ɚn.mənt/, /ɪnˈvaɪ.ɚ.mənt/
• Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

1. 1998 September 19, Jonathan Rauch, “Tunnel Vision: The Dawn of Microgovernment”, in National Journal ‎${}^{[1]}$, archived from the original on 6 March 2012: ↩

2. 2013 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly ‎${}^{[2]}$, volume 188, number 26, page 36: ↩

Link to original

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