In this paper, we study a class of nonbinary LDPC (NBLDPC) codes whose parity‐check matrices have column weight 2, called NBLDPC cycle codes. We propose a design framework of (2, ρ)‐regular binary quasi‐cyclic (QC) LDPC codes and then construct NBLDPC cycle codes of large girth based on circulants and finite fields by randomly choosing the nonzero field elements in their parity‐check matrices. For enlarging the girth values, our approach is twofold. First, we give an exhaustive search of circulants with column/row weight ρ and design a masking matrix with good cycle distribution based on the edge‐node relation in undirected graphs. Second, according to the designed masking matrix, we construct the exponent matrix based on finite fields. The iterative decoding performances of the constructed codes on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel are finally provided.