Produce aligned columns in a shell script

In shell how do I have an even length of spaces by the length of words on my menu?

I've tried to get the length of the longest character string and then create each column length by the longest string+1... also I'm having problems with this a lot and I'd like to read more on this topic.

Would it be awk or grep?

menuNAME       menuNAME2    menuNAME3
word word2 THISwordisLongest
THISwordisLongest word     wordLONG
wordLONG     THISwordisLongest word

Expected output:

menuNAME          menuNAME2         menuNAME3
word              wordLONG          THISwordisLongest
THISwordisLongest word              wordLONG
wordLONG          THISwordisLongest word