Remember when a new number meant a software release was a sighnificant, or major, one? For Java, that pattern is over. Java 9 was the last “major” release, Oracle says.
All versions after that—including the recently released Java 10 and the forthcoming Java 11—are what the industry typically calls “point releases,” because they were usually numbered x.1, x.2, and so on to indicate an intermediate, more “minor” release. (Oracle has called those point releases “feature releases.”)