schooner vs sloop

The core difference

• sloop — a single mast, carrying one mainsail and normally one headsail.
• schooner — two or more masts, fore-and-aft rigged, with the forward mast no taller than the one behind it.

Rig is the classification

Sailing vessels are named by rig — the arrangement of masts and sails — rather than by hull or size. Once that is clear, the whole vocabulary becomes systematic:

• Cutter — one mast like a sloop, but two or more headsails and the mast set further aft.
• Ketch — two masts, the after mast shorter and stepped forward of the rudder post.
• Yawl — like a ketch, but the small after mast sits behind the rudder post.
• Brig — two masts, both square-rigged.
• Barque — three or more masts, square-rigged except the aftmost, which is fore-and-aft.

The height rule that catches people out

A two-masted vessel whose forward mast is the taller is not a schooner — the taller-forward arrangement makes it something else. On a schooner the mainmast is aft. This is the opposite of the ketch and yawl, where the tall mast is forward, and it is the single most reliable way to tell a schooner from a ketch in a photograph.

Why schooners mattered commercially

The fore-and-aft rig sails much closer to the wind than square rig and needs a far smaller crew for the same tonnage. That combination made schooners the workhorse of coastal trade and fishing, particularly in North America, where a large schooner could be handled by a handful of hands.

The glass, and the etymology

Schooner also names a beer glass, and confusingly a different size in each country — larger than a pint in some places, smaller in others.

The ship's name is of uncertain origin. The popular story that it comes from a Scots verb scoon, to skim across water, is repeated widely but has no solid evidence behind it. Sloop comes from Dutch sloep, and English took a great deal of its nautical vocabulary from Dutch.