In the 18th and 19th centuries, a sloop_of_war was a small sailing warship with a single gun deck which carried between ten and eighteen cannons. A brig sloop had two masts and a ship sloop had three, because a brig in those days was a one or two masted vessel – to be a ship it had to have three or more masts. A ship sloop was generally an equivalent of a corvette. A sloop-of-war was smaller than a sailing frigate.
A sloop-of-war was quite different from a civilian sloop, which was a general term for a single masted vessel.
Successive generations of guns became larger in the second half of the 19th century, so by the 1880s even the most powerful warships had less than a dozen large calibre guns. The term had by then become much less precise, meaning a small warship with a single gun-deck and which was bigger than a gunboat. Especially famous were British mass-produced sloops of the "Flower" class of the First World War. By the Second World War it had come to mean a small warship armed with one or two 4-inch guns and depth charges. After the Second World War, the sloops were replaced by frigates.
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