Notably, while English tends to prefer shorter before longer complements, Japanese displays the opposite tendency. Far less cross-linguistic work has investigated possible differences in the ordering of nouns within conjunctions (“binomials’), although one corpus study suggests that the same factors predict binomial ordering in Japanese and English. To investigate the latter issue experimentally, we report Japanese and English speakers’ productions of names of the members of couples that they knew personally, and found that both groups tended to name the member they felt closer to first, which we consider as an index of conceptual accessibility. Length (syllables/mora) was not a significant predictor in either language. Results confirm that conceptual accessibility is the most important factor in the ordering of binomial names in both languages. Differences in the preferred order of a verb’s complements must be attributed to other factors.