Nansemond is an extinct jurisdiction that was located south of the James River in Virginia Colony and in the Commonwealth of Virginia (after statehood) in the United States, from 1646 until 1974. It was known as Nansemond County until 1972. From 1972 to 1974, a period of eighteen months, it was the independent city of Nansemond. It is now part of the independent city of Suffolk.
English colonists named it for the Nansemond, a tribe of Native Americans who had long been living along the Nansemond River, a tributary of what the English later named as the James River. They encountered the English colonists after they began arriving in 1607 at Jamestown. Although disrupted by being forced off their land and through armed confrontation with colonists, the Nansemond Indian Nation continues to be based in Virginia and was granted state (1985) and federal recognition (2018).