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4th one down "hypertext reference ..." unless I guessed wrong?

You did guess wrong - it seems to be 'head reference' actually. As the article explains, the original links were conceptualized with two anchors, the 'head' and the 'tail', and 'href' is the reference to the head of the link.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to RTFA?

IIRC, with respect to hypertext as a concept rather than specific HTML specs/implementations, hyperlinks were sometimes envisioned (implemented?) as being bi-directional references. As such, you needed an element on each end of the reference that pointed to the other end.

In thinking of "href" as "head reference", you are providing a URI (possibly also a target URL) from your source document -- the tail -- to the intended destination, the head.

I'm unclear what this looks like from the head's perspective. Is the tail/head distinction absolute, or relative and dependent upon the current document's perspective? If absolute, then the tail might be viewed as the link's instantiator.

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