A new word launched by the Chinese has spread like wildfire online with the character being shared millions of times in the Internet without anyone knowing exactly what it means.

The character, known as 'duang', has appeared more than 8 million times on Weibo, China's leading social media site, since its emergence last week, triggering hundreds of thousands of online conversations among netizens.

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The word is so new that although it does not exist yet in Chinese dictionaries, it has already taken the Internet by storm with western magazine Foreign Policy dubbing the character as a 'break the Internet' viral meme, much like the image of Kim Kardashian's backside last year and the multi-coloured dress image that went viral last week.

The new character apparently was coined after a shampoo advertisement of film star Jackie Chan was shown on video streaming site Youku.

Chan was endorsing the herbal shampoo, 'Bawang" in which at the end of the commercial, Chan reportedly appeared to say of the product "it's just...it's just...'it's just duang!'

The video gained attention among the Chinese youth, with hundreds of thousands of them speculating what the word meant.

A Chinese character representing the word was then circulated, which was made up of two characters of Chan's Chinese name.

More netizens took notice of the new character after Chan uploaded his 'Bawang' commercial on his Weibo page.

Reports said the word seems to be  similar to onomatopoeia, a word that phonetically imitates a sound. The word has no direct translation in English.

The character spawned a top trending hashtag and generated more than 312,000 discussions among 20,000 users.

It was looked up more than 600,000 times on China's largest search engine Baidu.

Although no one exactly knows what a 'duang' is, netizens have been attempting to use the new word as a noun, a verb, an adjective, or even a pronoun.

"Everyone's duang-ing and I still don't know what it means! Looks like it's back to school for me," said Weibo user Weileiweito.

Another user asked: "Have you duang-ed today? My mind is full of duang duang duang."

TagsDuang, Sino Weibo, Chinese Character, netizens