A floatplane is a type of seaplane with one or more slender floats mounted under the fuselage to provide buoyancy. By contrast, a flying boat uses its fuselage for buoyancy. Either type of seaplane may also have landing gear suitable for land, making the vehicle an amphibious aircraft. British usage is to call floatplanes "seaplanes" rather than use the term "seaplane" to refer to both floatplanes and flying boats.
A de Havilland Canada DHC-3T Turbo Otter floatplane in Harbour Air livery
A Vought UO-1 floatplane of the U.S. Navy
A seaplane is a powered fixed-wing aircraft capable of taking off and landing (alighting) on water. Seaplanes are usually divided into two categories based on their technological characteristics: floatplanes and flying boats; the latter are generally far larger and can carry far more. Seaplanes that can also take off and land on airfields are in a subclass called amphibious aircraft, or amphibians. Seaplanes were sometimes called hydroplanes, but currently this term applies instead to motor-powered watercraft that use the technique of hydrodynamic lift to skim the surface of water when running at speed.
A Grumman G-111 Albatross amphibious flying boat landing
OS2U Kingfisher in 1944, seaplanes were commonly used in WW2 to do reconnaissance and do search and rescue. They were launched from ships or seaplane tenders, or could take off from water in the right conditions
de Havilland Otter floatplane
Dornier X a flying boat airliner of the interwar period