Aircraft carrier
Types of carriers: 

General features: Speed is a crucial attribute for aircraft carriers, as they need to be able to be deployed quickly anywhere in the world and have to be fast enough to evade detection and targeting from enemy forces. A high speed also increases the "wind over the deck", boosting the lift available for fixed-wing aircraft to carry fuel and ammunition. To evade nuclear submarines, the carriers should have a speed of more than 30 knots (35 mph; 56 km/h).
Aircraft carriers are among the largest types of warships due to their need for ample deck space.
An aircraft carrier must be able to perform increasingly diverse mission sets. Diplomacy, power projection, quick crisis response force, land attack from the sea, sea base for helicopter and amphibious assault forces, anti-surface warfare (ASUW), defensive counter air (DCA), and humanitarian aid disaster relief (HADR) are some of the missions the aircraft carrier is expected to accomplish. Traditionally an aircraft carrier is supposed to be one ship that can perform at least power projection and sea control missions.
An aircraft carrier must be able to efficiently operate an air combat group. This means it should handle fixed-wing jets as well as helicopters. This includes ships designed to support operations of short-takeoff/vertical-landing (STOVL) jets.

Basic types: Aircraft cruiser
Amphibious assault ship and sub-types
Anti-submarine warfare carrier
Balloon carrier and balloon tenders
Escort carrier
Fleet carrier
Flight deck cruiser
Helicopter carrier
Light aircraft carrier
Seaplane tender and seaplane carriers
Utility carrier: This type was mainly used in the US Navy, in the decade after World War 2 to ferry aircraft.
Some of the types listed here are not strictly defined as aircraft carriers by some sources.

By role: A fleet carrier is intended to operate with the main fleet and usually provides an offensive capability. These are the largest carriers capable of fast speeds. By comparison, escort carriers were developed to provide defense for convoys of ships. They were smaller and slower with lower numbers of aircraft carried. Most were built from mercantile hulls or, in the case of merchant aircraft carriers, were bulk cargo ships with a flight deck added on top. Light aircraft carriers were fast enough to operate with the main fleet but of smaller size with reduced aircraft capacity.
The Soviet aircraft carrier Admiral Kusnetsov was termed a "heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser". This was primarily a legal construct to avoid the limitations of the Montreux Convention preventing 'aircraft carriers' transiting the Turkish Straits between the Soviet Black Sea bases and the Mediterranean Sea. These ships, while sized in the range of large fleet carriers, were designed to deploy alone or with escorts. In addition to supporting fighter aircraft and helicopters, they provide both strong defensive weaponry and heavy offensive missiles equivalent to a guided-missile cruiser.

By configuration: Aircraft carriers today are usually divided into the following four categories based on the way that aircraft take off and land:

Catapult-assisted take-off barrier-arrested recovery (CATOBAR): these carriers generally carry the largest, heaviest, and most heavily armed aircraft, although smaller CATOBAR carriers may have other limitations (weight capacity of aircraft elevator, etc.). All CATOBAR carriers in service today are nuclear-powered. Twelve are in service: ten Nimitz and one Gerald R. Ford-class fleet carriers in the United States; and the Charles de Gaulle in France.
Short take-off barrier-arrested recovery (STOBAR): these carriers are generally limited to carrying lighter fixed-wing aircraft with more limited payloads. STOBAR carrier air wings, such as the Sukhoi Su-33 and future Mikoyan MiG-29K wings of Admiral Kuznetsov are often geared primarily towards air superiority and fleet defense roles rather than strike/power projection tasks, which require heavier payloads (bombs and air-to-ground missiles). Five are in service: two in China, two in India, and one in Russia.
Short take-off vertical-landing (STOVL): limited to carrying STOVL aircraft. STOVL aircraft, such as the Harrier family and Yakovlev Yak-38 generally have limited payloads, lower performance, and high fuel consumption when compared with conventional fixed-wing aircraft; however, a new generation of STOVL aircraft, currently consisting of the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II, has much improved performance. Fourteen are in service; nine STOVL amphibious assault ships in the US; two carriers each in Italy and the UK; and one STOVL amphibious assault ship in Spain.
Helicopter carrier: Helicopter carriers have a similar appearance to other aircraft carriers but operate only helicopters – those that mainly operate helicopters but can also operate fixed-wing aircraft are known as STOVL carriers (see above). Seventeen are in service: four in Japan; three in France; two each in Australia, China, Egypt and South Korea; and one each in Brazil and Thailand. In the past, some conventional carriers were converted and these were called "commando carriers" by the Royal Navy. Some helicopter carriers, but not all, are classified as amphibious assault ships, tasked with landing and supporting ground forces on enemy territory.

By size: Fleet carrier
Light aircraft carrier
Escort carrier

Supercarrier: The appellation "supercarrier" is not an official designation with any national navy, but a term used predominantly by the media and typically when reporting on larger and more advanced carrier types. It is also used when comparing carriers of various sizes and capabilities, both current and past. It was first used by The New York Times in 1938, in an article about the Royal Navy's HMS Ark Royal, that had a length of 800 feet (244 m), a displacement of 22,000 ton and was designed to carry 72 aircraft. Since then, aircraft carriers have consistently grown in size, both in length and displacement, as well as improved capabilities; in defense, sensors, electronic warfare, propulsion, range, launch and recovery systems, number and types of aircraft carried and number of sorties flown per day.
China and the United Kingdom both have carriers in service or under construction with displacements ranging from 65,000 to 85,000 tons and lengths from 280 to 320 meters (920 to 1,050 ft) which have been described as "supercarriers". The largest "supercarriers" in service as of 2022, however, are with the US Navy, with displacements exceeding 100,000 tons, lengths of over 337 meters (1,106 ft), and capabilities that match or exceed those of any other class.

Hull type identification symbols: Several systems of identification symbol for aircraft carriers and related types of ship have been used. These include the pennant numbers used by the Royal Navy, Commonwealth countries, and Europe, along with the hull classification symbols used by the US and Canada.

History: 

Origins: The 1903 advent of the heavier-than-air fixed-wing airplane with the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was closely followed on 14 November 1910, by Eugene Burton Ely's first experimental take-off of a Curtiss Pusher airplane from the deck of a United States Navy ship, the cruiser USS Birmingham anchored off Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia. Two months later, on 18 January 1911, Ely landed his Curtiss Pusher airplane on a platform on the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania anchored in San Francisco Bay. On 9 May 1912, the first take off of an airplane from a ship while underway was made by Commander Charles Samson flying a Short Improved S.27 biplane "S.38" of the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) from the deck of the Royal Navy's pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Hibernia, thus providing the first practical demonstration of the aircraft carrier for naval operations at sea. Seaplane tender support ships came next, with the French Foudre of 1911.
Early in World War I, the Imperial Japanese Navy ship Wakamiya conducted the world's first successful ship-launched air raid: on 6 September 1914, a Farman aircraft launched by Wakamiya attacked the Austro-Hungarian cruiser SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth and the Imperial German gunboat Jaguar in Jiaozhou Bay off Qingdao; neither was hit. The first attack using an air-launched torpedo occurred on 2 August, when a torpedo was fired by Flight Commander Charles Edmonds from a Short Type 184 seaplane, launched from the seaplane carrier HMS Ben-my-Chree.
The first carrier-launched airstrike was the Tondern raid in July 1918. Seven Sopwith Camels were launched from the battlecruiser HMS Furious which had been completed as a carrier by replacing her planned forward turret with a flight deck and hangar prior to commissioning. The Camels attacked and damaged the German airbase at Tondern, Germany (modern day Tønder, Denmark), and destroyed two zeppelin airships.
The first landing of an airplane on a moving ship was by Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning, when he landed his Sopwith Pup on HMS Furious in Scapa Flow, Orkney on 2 August 1917. Landing on the forward flight deck required the pilot to approach round the ship's superstructure, a difficult and dangerous manoeuver and Dunning was later killed when his airplane was thrown overboard while attempting another landing on Furious.