The character is considered so popular among the young that the Planned Parenthood Association of Taiwan featured a specially commissioned Onionhead cartoon on the packaging of their condoms.
Onionhead's appeal has also reached overseas.
"It's hard to measure the popularity of Onionhead since most people swap them through IM rather than download them through our site," Chang said. "But we have licensed to merchandisers in China, Hong Kong and Macau."
However, there are complaints that the craze for emoticons has gone too far.
"I'm OK with an emoticon at the end of a sentence to highlight one's feelings, I'm even fine with emoticons that replace Chinese characters with the same character in a cutesy font," Nokimi said. "However, I cannot stand people who replace characters, or even multiple characters, with pictures."
This practice, known as "picture language" (
When Annie types the Chinese character for "no" her friends see a GIF animation of a man shaking his head.
Each sentence she types in IM might automatically bring up three or four such "picture language" icons.
"Friends have complained that I use too many icons when I chat on MSN," Annie said. "However, I don't think it's that hard to guess what I'm saying given the context. If they still can't figure it out, they can always right click to find out what the picture is meant to say."
"That's exactly what I find the most obnoxious about picture language users," Nokimi said. "Their desire to try something novel wastes my time."
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