http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/facts/stages_cancer.htm

Here is the page on staging in case people are having a hard time finding it. I think that it goes without saying that there is some semantic issue here. You can have a stage one lesion for instance, meaning it is under a certain dimension in size, but not be a stage one patient as adding mets to the nodes takes you out of being a stage one. So the TNM system is a little more finite, but still all this is just a mechanism for docs to talk to each other and immediately have the other doc know a great deal about the patient, and to use as a guideline, not an absolute, for developing an appropriate treatment plan.