What is "moth-ball"

Usage examples of "moth-ball".

I climbed them all, passing the avenues of passages, and came to a landing and a heavy curtain with a moth-ball fringe.

Officially, BuShips moth-balled Reserve should have at least seventy-five percent of Battle Fleets active strength in each class, yet it boasted barely thirty-six percent of its authorized numerical strength& and less than ten percent of its authorized tonnage.

From inside bloomed the smell of moth-balls, shoe leather and lavender water.

Then the intruder pissed and shat on the cover of the Bordens' bed, knocked the clutter of this and that on the dresser to the floor, smashing everything, swept into Old Borden's dressing room there to maliciously assault the funeral coat as it hung in the moth-balled dark of his closet with the self-same nail scissors that had been used on the safe (the nail scissors now split in two and were abandoned on the closet floor), retired to the kitchen, smashed the flour crock and the treacle crock, and then scrawled an obscenity or two on the parlour window with the cake of soap that lived beside the scullery sink.

So I dug out an old school uniform--the only thing I could find that might fit him: he reeks of moth-balls, but he seems a little happier.