Sentence:  All Southerners agree that slavery had to go ; but <WSD>many</WSD> historians maintain that except for Northern meddling it would have ended in states like Virginia years before it did . 
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