Complications from dual roles of sodium hydride as a base and as a reducing agent.

Sodium hydride is a common reagent for substrate activation in nucleophilic substitution reactions. Sodium hydride can behave both as a base and as a source of hydride. This dual ability in the presence of an electrophile such as benzyl bromide results in the formation of byproducts when dimethylformamide or acetonitrile are used as solvents for these reactions. The structural nature of these byproducts is revealed in this report.