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How can words such as table and book be used as both nouns and verbs in English?

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In English, words such as table and book can function as both nouns and verbs due to a linguistic process where a word is used in a new grammatical role without changing its form. While nouns typically refer to people, places, or things, and verbs express actions or states of being, English allows for the functional shift of words between these categories.123

To distinguish between these roles, one must consider how the word functions within a specific sentence. For example:1

As a noun: "I placed the book on the table." Here, the words label objects.1
As a verb: "I need to book a flight" or "We should table this discussion." In these instances, the words describe an action.1

This flexibility is a common feature of the language, where nouns are frequently "verbed"—meaning they are adapted to function as verbs to describe actions related to the original noun. While some words are strictly one or the other, many English words possess this dual capability depending on their syntactic context.31