Major, minor, and z-stream releases
A Red Hat major release represents a significant step in the development of a product. Minor releases appear more frequently within the scope of a major release and represent deprecation boundaries that might impact future application compatibility. A z-stream release is an update to a minor release which provides a stream of continuous fixes to an associated minor release. API and AOE compatibility is never broken in a z-stream release except when this policy is explicitly overridden in order to respond to an unforeseen security impact.
For example, in the release 4.13.2:
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4 is the major release version
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13 is the minor release version
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2 is the z-stream release version