environment

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The totality of the natural world, often excluding humans.
• noun A subset of the natural world; an ecosystem.
• noun The combination of external physical conditions that affect and influence the growth, development, behavior, and survival of organisms.
• noun The complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of an individual person or community.
• noun The general set of conditions or circumstances.
• noun The entire set of conditions under which one operates a computer, as it relates to the hardware, operating platform, or operating system.
• noun 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.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of environing or surrounding, or the state of being environed.
• noun That which environs; the aggregate of surrounding things or conditions.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

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

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the totality of surrounding conditions
• noun the area in which something exists or lives