A barque is a vessel with at least three masts, all of them fully square rigged except for the sternmost one, which is fore-and-aft rigged.
The wooden three-masted barque was the most common type of deep-water cargo-carrier in the middle of the 19th century. However, only one such vessel has survived to our days - the Sigyn.
The typical cargo-carrier of the early 20th century was the four-masted steel barque. When four-masted barques started to appear in the 19th century, they were often called full-rigged ships since they had three square rigged masts, and a ship was more highly regarded than a barque. In America, the term shipentine was also used in reference to four-masted barques. This semantic confusion mostly got settled by the end of the 19th century.
Only six five-masted barques were built, the first one being the France, built in 1890. There are some fine barques that are still sailing, for example the four-masted barques Sedov and Kruzenstern, and the three-masted barques Statsraad Lehmkuhl, Eagle, Sagres and Gorch Fock.