# environment

Pronunciation: US say "in-VY-urn-muhnt" /ɪnˈvaɪɚ(n)mənt/; UK say "in-VY-ruh-muhnt" /ɪnˈvaɪɹəmənt/

## Noun

1. The conditions and surroundings in which someone or something exists or operates, including social and political ones, and the influence they have.
   - Simple: The place, people, and conditions around someone or something that affect how they live or work.
   - _The company tried to create a relaxed work environment._
   - _Animals adapt to the environment in which they live._
2. The natural world, including its living things and the systems that support them.
   - Simple: The natural world of land, water, air, plants, and animals.
   - _Conservation groups work to defend the environment from industrial damage._
   - _Plastic waste in the oceans poses a serious threat to the marine environment._
3. The software and hardware present on a particular computer system.
   - Simple: All the software and hardware set up on a computer.
   - _The new feature crashed in the production environment but ran fine on local machines._
   - _Each developer sets up an identical environment to avoid version conflicts._
4. All the elements that act on a system, or on the inputs it takes in and the outputs it produces.
   - Simple: Everything around a system that affects it or affects what goes into it and comes out of it.
   - _Designers mapped every part of the environment that could disturb the control system._
   - _The model treats temperature and humidity as part of the system's environment._

## Other meanings

- (noun) The set of variables and their values that an operating system links to a running process.
- (noun) The set of identifiers in a function's scope and their bindings at a given point during a program's execution.

## Origin

This word comes from Middle French "environnement" (compare modern French "environnement"); by surface analysis it can be broken down into "environ" plus the suffix "-ment."

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/environment (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).