The story
From tri- (“three”) + cent (“hundred”), as if from Latin trecentī passūs (“three hundred paces”), by analogy with the etymology of mile from Latin mīlle passūs (“mile; a thousand paces”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
tricent
Today it means: A li, a traditional Chinese unit of distance equal to 1500 chis or 150 zhangs, now standardized as a half-kilometer (500 meters). Full definition →