Noun

(en noun)

A knot, knob, protuberance or swelling.

(astronomy) The point where the orbit of a planet, as viewed from the Sun, intersects the ecliptic. The ascending and descending nodes refer respectively to the points where the planet moves from S to N and N to S. The respective symbols are .

(botany) A stem node.

(computer networking) A computer or other device attached to a network.

(engineering) The point at which the lines of a funicular machine meet from different angular directions; -- called also knot.

(geometry) The point at which a curve crosses itself, being a double point of the curve. See Crunode, and Acnode.

(graph theory) A vertex or a leaf in a graph of a network, or other element in a data structure.

(medicine) A hard concretion or incrustation which forms upon bones attacked with rheumatism, gout, or syphilis; sometimes also, a swelling in the neighborhood of a joint.

(physics) A point along a standing wave where the wave has minimal amplitude.

(rare) The knot, intrigue, or plot of a piece.

(technical) A hole in the gnomon of a sundial, through which passes the ray of light which marks the hour of the day, the parallels of the Sun's declination, his place in the ecliptic, etc.

The word of interest in a KWIC, surrounded by left and right cotexts.

Noun

(en noun)

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

The natural world or ecosystem.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=David Simpson

, volume=188, issue=26, page=36, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Fantasy of navigation , passage=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 .}}

All the elements over which a designer has no control and that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.

A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.

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

(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.