The motion of a spherical dust cloud is described by the Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi solution and is completely specified by initial values of distributions of the rest mass density and specific energy of the dust fluid. From generic initial conditions of this spherically symmetric collapse, there appears a naked singularity at the symmetric center in the course of the gravitational collapse of the dust cloud. So this might be a counterexample to the cosmic censorship hypothesis. To investigate the genericity of this example, we examine the stability of the “nakedness” of this singularity against odd-parity modes of non-spherical linear perturbations for the metric, i.e., linear gravitational waves. We find that the perturbations do not diverge but are well-behaved even in the neighborhood of the central naked singularity. This means that the naked singularity formation process is marginally stable against the odd-parity modes of linear gravitational waves. © 1998 The American Physical Society.