Great question. I like to use Arrowdie when I can. For my "The Official U.S. Casino Chip Price Guides" we shorten this word to less characters so that it fits in the column "Mold" where we only have room for 7 letters. We describe Arodie "12 repetitions of Arrows and Dice- each die is numbered. The most popular mold" as taken from the Molds section "Descriptions and examples of clubs that used them." section of my 4th edition guide. I feel most of us in the hobby pronounce both words as you put it "Air row dye". I believe the Arrow-die disignation for this mold was the early work of Bruce Landau in describing molds of the chips he had acquired for his vast collection. I dont have one of his lists handy right now.
Others can enlighten us on some of the facts perhaps more about manufacturer, distributor and dates if you are interested. This would be a great topic of discussion here. I forget if I have seen the proper description or name in any gaming catalogs.