Story highlights How are women and men talked about in sport?

Study published by British university

It analyzed over 160 million words

(CNN) Welcome to the world of sport. It's a world where men are "strong, big, real, great or fastest," while women are more likely to be "aged, pregnant or unmarried."

That's the conclusion of new research from the UK's Cambridge University Press, which has looked at the way we talk about men and women in sport.

Analyzing over 160 million words from decades of newspapers, academic papers, tweets and blogs, the study finds men are three times more likely than women to be mentioned in a sporting context, while women are disproportionately described in relation to their marital status, age or appearance.

"People perhaps aren't aware of the differences in the way people focus on the appearance and marital status of female athletes," Cambridge language researcher Sarah Grieves told CNN Sport ahead of the start of the Olympic Games on Friday.

"The research is merely descriptive -- and doesn't aim to provide answers to larger questions -- but it does bring to the fore things people maybe aren't consciously aware of when they're speaking about different genders in sports."

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