Degrees and shades

Most words in this list sit somewhere on a line between kaum and völlig, and the difficulty is rarely the meaning — it is the exact position on the line. One of them changes its meaning with its job. As an adjective, denkbar is what an English speaker expects: conceivable, possible. Eine denkbare Lösung is a solution somebody could imagine. Put the same word in front of another adjective and it stops talking about possibility and starts measuring. Der Zeitpunkt war denkbar ungünstig does not say the timing was conceivably bad; it says it was as bad as anybody could imagine. Denkbar knapp is as close as it gets, denkbar einfach as simple as it gets. Read it as conceivably and a superlative turns into a guess. The rest of the list does the same work at other points on the line: leidlich near the bottom, vollends at the top.