Definition of "environment"

The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.  examples

The natural world or ecosystem.  quotations  examples

All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.  examples

A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.  examples

(computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.  examples

(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.  examples

(computing) The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.  examples