Electron cyclotron emission can be a sensitive indicator of nonthermal electron distributions. A new, comprehensive ray‐tracing and cyclotron emission code that is aimed at predicting and interpreting the cyclotron emission from tokamak plasmas is described. The radiation transfer equation is solved along Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin (WKB) rays using a fully relativistic calculation of the emission and absorption from electron distributions that are gyrotropic and toroidally symmetric, but may be otherwise arbitrary functions of the constants of motion. Using a radial array of electron distributions obtained from a bounce‐averaged Fokker–Planck code modeling dc electron field and electron cyclotron heating effects, the cyclotron emission spectra are obtained. A pronounced strong nonthermal cyclotron emission feature that occurs at frequencies relativistically downshifted to second harmonic cyclotron frequencies outside the tokamak is calculated, in agreement with experimental results from the DIII‐D [J. L. Luxon and L. G. Davies, Fusion Technol.8, 441 (1985)] and FT‐1 [D. G. Bulyginskyetal., inProceedingsofthe15thEuropeanConferenceonControlledFusionandPlasmaHeating, Dubrovnik, 1988 (European Physical Society, Petit‐Lancy, 1988), Vol. 12B, Part II, p. 823] tokamaks. The calculations indicate the presence of a strong loss mechanism that operates on electrons in the 100–150 keV energy range.