Most of the thousands of summits in the Interior Mountains are unnamed, and they are mostly uninhabited and undeveloped.

The terms Interior Mountains and Northern Interior Mountains were coined by British Columbia government geographer Stuart Holland in the course of writing his Landforms of British Columbia, which is a definitive volume on the province's topography and toponymy written in 1964.

This work is used as the basis for official toponymies such as those in the provincial gazette and the British Columbia Geographic Names Information System Database (BCGNIS), which is the official registry of the province's geographic names.

The term Interior Mountains, used by Holland throughout his work and as a chapter heading describing the mountain system in question, is not present in the Geographical Names Database despite being a chapter heading and appearing on Holland's map of the province's landform systems.

In his exegesis, he decided on "Interior Mountains" for reasons of brevity.