background vs environment

background

noun
  • A part of the picture that depicts scenery to the rear or behind the main subject; context. 

  • One's social heritage, or previous life; what one did in the past. 

  • Information relevant to the current situation about past events; history. 

  • The image or color over which a computer's desktop items are shown (e.g. icons or application windows). 

  • A less important feature of scenery (as opposed to foreground). 

  • A type of activity on a computer that is not normally visible to the user. 

adj
  • Less important or less noticeable in a scene or system. 

verb
  • To put in a position that is not prominent. 

  • To gather and provide background information (on). 

environment

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

  • The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process. 

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

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

  • 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. 

  • The natural world or ecosystem. 

  • The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system. 

How often have the words background and environment occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )