Noun

(en noun)

The area on the periphery of a city or large town.

* Hallam

[London] could hardly have contained less than thirty or forty thousand souls within its walls; and the suburbs were very populous.

(by extension) The outer part; the environment.

* Jeremy Taylor

the suburbs of sorrow

* Milton

the suburb of their straw-built citadel

(AU, NZ) Any subdivision of a conurbation, not necessarily on the periphery.

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.