"[1] Chinese scholars interpret the first title character ěr (爾; "you, your; adverbial suffix") as a phonetic loan character for the homophonous ěr (邇; "near; close; approach"), and believe the second yǎ (雅; "proper; correct; refined; elegant") refers to words or language.

Although it is traditionally attributed to the Duke of Zhou, Confucius, or his disciples, scholarship suggests that someone compiled and edited diverse glosses from commentaries to pre-Qin texts, especially the Shijing.

[5] The Japanese historian and sinologist Naitō Torajirō analyzed the Erya text and concluded it originated in the early Warring States period, with the Jixia Academy having a considerable hand in it from c. 325 BCE onwards, and the text was enlarged and stabilized during the Qin and Western Han dynasty.

The Erya was considered the authoritative lexicographic guide to Chinese classic texts during the Han dynasty, and Song dynasty Confucians officially categorized it as one of the Thirteen Classics, "making it one of the more revered works in the history of Chinese literature, not to mention lexicography".

The Southern Song dynasty scholar Luo Yuan (羅願) subsequently wrote the (1174) Eryayi (爾雅翼, "Wings to the Erya") interpretation.

In the history of Chinese lexicography, nearly all dictionaries were collated by graphic systems of character radicals, first introduced in the Shuowen Jiezi.

However, a few notable exceptions, called yashu 雅書 "[Er]ya-type books", adopted collation by semantic categories such as Heaven and Earth.

Karlgren explains that the book "is not a dictionary in abstracto, it is a collection of direct glosses to concrete passages in ancient texts.

Entries for specialized terms are defined by grouping related words and giving them a description, explanation, classification, or comparison.