Oral cancer is a malignant disease, the diagnosis and treatment of which represents a public health problem. Given that oral cancer is most often diagnosed at a late stage and its early diagnosis depends on the experience of the doctor and clinical examination, there is a need for the development of new and improvement of old techniques that will speed up and facilitate diagnosis, and thus increase the survival rate from this disease. Nanotechnology is considered a new, promising discipline that provides new approach and gives conventional methods a wider application. Diagnostic methods such as magnetic resonance imaging, optical coherence tomography, photoacoustic imaging, surface plasmon resonance, Raman spectroscopy, diffuse reflectance tomography, quantum dots, and newly discovered biomarkers provide the possibility of earlier detection of oral cancer. Nanostructures increase the sensitivity, but also the specificity of the above-mentioned methods. Also, the therapeutic methods that could potentially be used (nanomaterials as drug carriers, photodynamic therapy, gene silencing, photothermal therapy) are based on the use of numerous nanostructures, which with their specific properties (size, shape, hydrophobicity, surface functionality, surface to volume ratio) could enable more efficient and prolonged action of chemotherapeutics and other therapeutic methods. In the last ten years, methods based on nanotechnology have been developed which, in addition to resulting in numerous new researches, potentially enable progress in the treatment and diagnosis of oral cancer.