Doric names the oldest and plainest of the three famous Greek styles of stone building. (The other two you will meet later are Ionic and Corinthian.) A Doric column is thick and strong-looking. The top — the capital — is a simple round cushion, with no leaves or curls. You see that look on old Greek temples, and later on banks, museums, and government buildings that wanted to look serious and ancient. Architects and art teachers still say “Doric” when they mean that style. It is a rather formal, specialist word: you meet it in class, in a guidebook, or in history, not in the playground. Write it with a capital D when you mean the Greek style, as you would for a name. Though actually, the same spelling can also mean an old kind of Greek speech, and in Scotland people use Doric for a local way of speaking — those are other uses. Here we mean the building style, named after the Dorians, one of the Greek peoples. Athenians once looked down on the Dorians as rustic, a bit “country”; that old attitude is probably why the word later stretched to “plain, country speech.” But the building sense is the simple, heavy column.