Column oriented DBMS are systems that store all the data related to a single column together, unlinke traditional DBMS that store data by row.
Sometimes the term is confused or used interchangeably with wide column store which is a different concept related to nosql databases.
In order to be unambiguous it's better to use the wide-column-store tag when dealing with systems like cassandra, and use column-oriented when dealing with systems like vertica.
Certain systems, like hbase share both features, they have a wide column store data model but also store data on disk in a column oriented way (specifcally grouped by column family).