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.
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.