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The study of δαφοινός, φοινός and their derivatives in the Homeric corpus leads to the conclusion that φοινός, far from being an old form, etymologically related to φοῖνιξ, as taught by ancient scholars and modern scholars alike, is a neologism back-formed from δαφοινός and wrongly analysed as a compound. Thus, φοινός belongs only to a recent phase of the epic language. The link with φοῖνιξ is a synchronic etymology, which caused the erroneous segmentation δα-φοινός and the identification of a pseudo-intensive prefix δα-. The linguistic analysis agrees with the formular analysis showing that φοινός and its by-form φοίνιος are found at the end of a derivational chain starting from Il. 10.23, and agrees with the doubts voiced by philologists for over a century about the authenticity of those lines, which are probably interpolated and at the very least recent. The etymology of δαφοινός remains unclear.