I'm setting up a data warehouse in my company. In my experience the initial tables you insert data into, before you transform it into something user friendly, are called staging tables.
However the tech team here use dev, staging and production environments for software development. I've asked and seeing something called *_staging on a production environment would seem really confusing to them.
This naming clash must be a common one so I'm wondering is it normal practice to just put up with it or is there a standard alternative name?
In traditional data warehouse design these are usually called "staging tables", although sometimes called "raw tables". You might mitigate the confusion by using the common contraction "stg" instead of "staging".
And increasingly, and especially in big data projects, the term "data lake" is used to refer to the repository that stores copies of source system data. "data lake" is essentially persistent staging with some direct access for analytics allowed.