Sentence:  Only a radical change in the nature of the population in the central city would be likely to destroy this preference - and we must now turn our attention to the question of whether such a change , gloomily foreseen by so <WSD>many</WSD> urban diagnosticians , is actually upon us . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  a quantifier that can be used with count nouns and is often preceded by `as' or `too' or `so' or `that'; amounting to a large but indefinite number