What does Doric mean?

Answer 1

Doric could refer to two things, which are partially related:

The first is an ethnic grouping roughly consisting of the peoples of the Peloponnese. They are frequently contrasted to the Ionic ethnic group, which consisted of those living in eastern mainland Greece, the Greek islands, and the Greek colonies on the west coast of modernday Turkey and Asia Minor. They all considered themselves Greek, but different, and had different dialects and slight differences in their alphabets in the archaic and early classical periods.

Doric is also a type of monumental architecture used in temple construction. Again it is contrasted with the Ionic (and later Corinthian) types of temple architecture. Doric architecture was characterised by columns without bases and with plain capitals (the bit at the top of the column between it and the roof), and metopes and triglyphs (Google it, it's quite complicated to explain without pictures). By comparison, Ionic archtitecture boasted more slender columns with bases and scrolled capitals, and a continuous frieze (often containing sculture) in the architrave rather than alternating metopes and triglyphs. Corinthian is similar to Ionic but with leafy capitals instead of scrolled ones.