Mothbally

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Resembling or suggesting mothballs, especially their distinctive odour.

    "A skinny blotter paper suffused with the rosy chemical geraniol and layered with a second blotter dipped in mothbally indole yields lily of the valley, which otherwise would require bales of tender white buds for just a few grams of essential oil."

Example

More examples

"A skinny blotter paper suffused with the rosy chemical geraniol and layered with a second blotter dipped in mothbally indole yields lily of the valley, which otherwise would require bales of tender white buds for just a few grams of essential oil."

Etymology

From mothball + -y.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.