The observation that all the seven examples of ὄρεσφι in the Iliad occur in similes prompted me to examine the similes of the poem for other linguistic peculiarities, which I soon found to be abundant. The obvious question of interest then was whether these peculiarities belonged to the one rather than to the other of the two main types of unusual features in the dialect: archaisms and neologisms. It was immediately apparent that similes were full of rare late forms, whereas archaisms were very few and mostly uncertain. (It is of course immaterial that similes contain such archaisms as the genitive plural in -άων or the dative plural in -εσσι, which are part of the stock-in-trade of all epic poetry.)

A related question is whether an undue proportion of late forms occurs in similes. For the consideration of this question I made, for Studies in the Language of Homer (1953), a list of such forms from the first volume of Chantraine's Grammaire homérique (Phonétique et Morphologie), and examined their localization. I found it to be a fact that many, especially of the most striking of these forms, did occur in similes. At the same time I noticed that of the remainder a large number occurred in other types of passages which in one way or another fell out of the main narrative.