State Transfer

From Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, the PhD dissertation of Roy T. Fielding, page 109 (2000):

"The name “Representational State Transfer” is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through the application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use."

Thus, it is the state of the whole application that is being transferred in REST, not the state of particular resources as suggested here.