January 3, 1985

Because of an editing error, an article in some copies of Sports Pages yesterday about the University of Washington football team misstated its pre-bowl ranking in a news-agency poll. It was ranked third by United Press International but fourth by The Associated Press.

Under this heading, The Times amplifies articles or rectifies what the editors consider significant lapses of fairness, balance or perspective. An article on the Washington Talk page on Dec. 19 attributed a table of ''convoluted phraseology'' to Donald G. Groves, a staff scientist with the National Material Advisory Board.

A picture caption yesterday with an article about an Ernest Hemingway manuscript misidentified a publishing company official. He is Charles Scribner 3d, executive vice president of Charles Scribner's Sons.

The first comprehensive statistical portrait of Americans aged 85 or older is emerging from new research on the elderly. This group, called by various scholars the old old, the oldest old and the extreme aged, numbers 2.6 million and is growing more rapidly than any younger segment of the population. Until recently little studied by social scientists and virtually unrecognized by governmental decision makers, the group amounts to 1.1 percent of the population, according to the latest estimate, for July 1983. The findings underscore concerns about the toll of the chronic multiple illnesses, the poverty and the widowhood suffered by some in the over-85 population. But the research also indicates that, as a group, those 85 and older are less frail, less likely to be institutionalized and more independent than previously believed.

DR. BRUCE FADER, a psychiatrist, and Kim Brown Fader, an editor, may still work in Manhattan and often socialize there on weekends. But from Grand Central they are only half an hour by train from the arugula, watercress, bok choy and bibb and Boston lettuce growing in the heated greenhouse of a large house they recently bought in the Park Hill area of Yonkers. On the acre of land around their home the couple have planted an orchard of dwarf fruit trees and a vegetable and fruit garden. After looking for about five years for a suitable dwelling for their family of five in New York, the Faders discovered an enclave of large, late-19th- and early-20th-century houses in what Dr. Fader calls ''a pocket of cheapness.'' The Faders paid $140,000 for a 5,000- square-foot house that has an 18-by-30-foot library, an adjacent 15-by- 15-foot reading room and a 15-by-30-foot living room, besides its land and greenhouse. There is, of course, work to be done in the 1894 structure; they have started refinishing the elaborate woodwork of the staircase themselves. ''We're trying to do things the inexpensive way, which takes more time,'' Dr. Fader said. ''But in two or three years we'll be living in a mansion.''