Sentence:  Scarcity of paper caused <WSD>many</WSD> Southerners to adopt the practice of cross writing , i. e. , after writing from left to right of the page in the usual manner , they gave the sheet a half turn and wrote from end to end across the lines previously written . 
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