§ 9-10-204.Action for words

Georgia calls this an “action for words,” and the phrase says exactly what it covers: a lawsuit over something the defendant said, not wrote, about the plaintiff. It is the statutory form for slander, the spoken cousin of libel.

Unlike the article’s other forms, this one does not divide into numbered paragraphs — it packs the whole claim into a single allegation. The complaint must state that the defendant spoke false and malicious words about the plaintiff, on a specific date, to a specific named person, and it must set out the words themselves. That last requirement matters: a slander claim rises or falls on the precise language used, so the form insists the actual words be quoted rather than paraphrased or summarized.

The complaint also has to name a listener other than the plaintiff. Spoken words only injure a reputation once someone besides the speaker and the subject hears them, so identifying who the defendant spoke to establishes that the statement reached a third party. The dollar figure for that injury appears at the outset of the complaint’s single substantive paragraph, not at the close — the form ends the same way every form in this article does, with a generic demand that the court grant whatever relief the plaintiff lists, without repeating a dollar amount there.