These words refer to the inner portions of a country, to rural regions, or to those remote from cosmopolitan or urban centres. Backblocks is the most general of these and can apply to any of the three situations listed above; its connotations imply a provincial area that is sparsely settled or unimportant: tourists who visit the country’s principal cities but seldom go into the backblocks .

Interior and inland are restricted in reference to the inner portions a country, rural or urban, both words having fewer connotations than the previous one. Inland may suggest the greater remoteness of these two words: the inland of the continent; the interior of the island. Interior can, however, suggest greater inaccessibility: an inland lake; the first expeditions to the interior of Africa. Midlands can also function neutrally, but is used mostly to refer to inland regions of England: the great industrial cities of the midlands. Neither remoteness nor inaccessibility is implied here, although provinciality may be indicated.

Much more popular and less formal than inland or interior is bush , which is widely used to refer to extensive, unsettled or sparsely settled regions, as well as to an area of bushland anywhere. The idiom go bush can mean to leave a town or city for remoter regions or simply to disappear for a while. Outback is a Australian word, referring generally to the arid or semi-arid areas that constitute the major portion of the continent. Whereas bush can refer to an area not built on, and both bush and backblocks can indicate inland regions not necessarily far removed from centres of population, outback conveys a suggestion of extreme remoteness from civilization: children of the outback , learning their lessons by radio in a "classroom" covering a million square miles; the trackless wastes of the far outback, where only an Aborigine could survive. Sticks is an informal American word pertaining to rural areas or provincial centres that are unsophisticated or backward. It is always somewhat derogatory or disparaging in tone: a hick from the sticks ; like so many young men who left the sticks to seek his fortune in the big city. Where it is used in Australia and New Zealand, sticks also has this rural sense but frequently it is part of a disparaging reference to an outer suburb as being "the sticks " or "in the sticks " because it is so far from the city.