In programming terms, it’s the larger surrounding part which can have any influence on the behaviour of the current unit of work. E.g. the running environment used, the environment variables, instance variables, local variables, state of other classes, state of the current environment, etcetera.
In some API’s you see this name back in an interface/class, e.g. Servlet’s ServletContext, JSF’s FacesContext, Spring’s ApplicationContext, Android’s Context, JNDI’s InitialContext, etc. They all often follow the Facade Pattern which abstracts the environmental details the enduser doesn’t need to know about away in a single interface/class.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3918083/what-exactly-is-a-context-in-java
out of my memory 