How many of each letter do I need to set the type for every month of the year?

I start with a list of the months, in a text file, months.txt:

JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER

Using my text editor–Sublime in my case, but you can use anything that supports find-and-replace with regular expressions, I replace:

(.)

with:

$1\n

In other words, I replace every letter with that letter followed by a carriage newline.

Which results in:

J
A
N
U
A
R
Y

F
E
B
R
U
A
R
Y

M
A
R
C
H

A
P
R
I
L

M
A
Y

J
U
N
E

J
U
L
Y

A
U
G
U
S
T

S
E
P
T
E
M
B
E
R

O
C
T
O
B
E
R

N
O
V
E
M
B
E
R

D
E
C
E
M
B
E
R

Finally I use some sort and uniq magic to product a frequency count:

# sort months.txt | uniq -c
  11 
   7 A
   5 B
   3 C
   1 D
  11 E
   1 F
   1 G
   1 H
   1 I
   3 J
   2 L
   5 M
   3 N
   3 O
   2 P
   9 R
   2 S
   3 T
   6 U
   1 V
   4 Y

I’m now set to set type, knowing I need a font with at least 11 Es, 9 Rs, and so on.

And here’s the result:

Driven to a rectangle (where, as it turns out, the real shortages–of space material–emerged):

And a proof pulled: