Definition of release candidate in English English dictionary
A version of a program that is nearly ready for release but may still have a few bugs; the status between beta version and release version
The release candidate is a production-quality pre-release one week before the final release. In an ideal world, it would be (functionally) identical to the final release. From here until FinalRelease, changes are only permitted at the release manager's discretion, and will only be allowed for very high-priority showstopper bugs that might justify delaying the release