Word.ws English Dictionary

mothbally

mothbally adjective: resembling or suggesting mothballs, especially their distinctive odour.

Adjective

mothbally (comparative more mothbally, superlative most mothbally)

  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.2009 March 13, Phoebe Eaton, “Liquid Assets”, in New York Times

Forms of mothbally

comparativemore mothbally
superlativemost mothbally

Origin of mothbally

From mothball + -y.

Questions about mothbally

What does mothbally mean?
Mothbally means resembling or suggesting mothballs, especially their distinctive odour.
What part of speech is mothbally?
Mothbally is an adjective.

Words near mothbally in the dictionary

  1. mothballer
  2. mothballers
  3. mothballing
  4. mothballings
  5. mothballs
  6. mothbally
  7. motheaten
  8. mothed
  9. mother
  10. mother abscess
  11. mother abscesses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mothbally (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “mothbally.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mothbally. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.