While I won't check my facts, it feels likely the publication is to blame on this one. I'm pretty sure the Egyptians are not referring to it as anything in English. Meanwhile, how can a writer resist playing on "the world's largest river in Egypt"? (Okay, perhaps they should have resisted harder.)
I guess if they would have called it 'world's largest canal', it would have been more obvious that the title is not true.
That honor goes to the Grand Canal in China, with a length of 1776km.
No I don't think there's a reason. Possibly that the primary sense of a canal is to transport things and this is to transport water. But that's the other sense of the word. I blame it on the firing of copy editors. Maybe this is another thing chatgpt can save us from.
