I don't think such a database exists, but it should be doable. There are only 325 distinct letter-pairs to fill in. The poet Charles Messina has made a decent start here: https://books.google.com/books?id=45fGCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=%22charle... I'm sorry about the bulky URL; it's a Google Books search and I don't know how to trim it. The poem is called "Deuces Wild". On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 9:12 AM James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:

Say I want to describe a two-player game, and for mnemonic reasons, I want the names of the players to start with two specific letters (such as the letters I and D in my previous email). Is there a database I can query that will give me a pair of famously linked individuals whose first names start with the respective letters? (They could be siblings or spouses or friends or rivals, as long as the relationship between them is common knowledge.)

This is related to a party game (I believe I invented it but I could be mistaken) in which two letters are drawn from a bag, and within some limited time each player, working on their own, has to generate pairs of words starting with those respective letters. For instance, S and P could give "salt / pepper", "strict / permissive", "Standard" / "Poor", etc. People go around the room saying what they found, and anything that was found by just one person gets crossed out. Then there's a scoring stage, whose details I forget, that rewards people for finding pairs that were found by a small but still positive number of other people.

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