Is "There were a large number..." or "There was a large number..." correct? [duplicate]

Is the sentence "There was a large number of students in the auditorium," or "There were a large number of students in the auditorium," correct? I am unsure because I believe if you consider, "... a large number..." which is singular, then you would use "was," but if you considered "students," which is plural, then you would have to use the plural verb "were". Is "was" or "were" correct in this sentence?

Solution 1:

Consider this pair:

[1] There were [a large number of students] in the auditorium.

[2] The large number of students in the auditorium] was very surprising.

The simple answer is that [1], with the determiner "a" takes a plural verb, while [2], which has the determiner "the", takes a singular verb.

In more detail:

"Number" in [1] is a non-count quantificational noun, which is said to be 'number-transparent' in that the number of the whole bracketed noun phrase depends on the number of the noun phrase that is complement to "of", called the oblique'. In [1] the oblique is the plural noun phrase "students".

As it happens, "number" selects only plural obliques, meaning that the NP here can only be plural, requiring the plural verb "were".

Different considerations apply, though, when the definite article is "the". In the number-transparent sense, "number" indicates an imprecise number, but elsewhere it indicates a precise number, in which case it can take "the", as in [2].

Here, the NP is singular by virtue of having singular non-transparent "number" as head.