While I’m most familiar with “wash”, this word has a much broader meaning than “arroyo” or “wadi” . A web search for “wash” turns up all sorts of things related to laundry and hygiene but not much about the dry watercourses we are discussing here. Web search results for “arroyo” and “wadi” are more on topic. Although often used to mean a dry stream bed, “arroyo” may just mean any brook/stream (including flowing) in the original Spanish. I’m not sure if this is the case, but if so it could cause confusion. It seems like “wadi” may refer to the whole valley containing a dry watercourse so there could be some room for confusion there as well, but overall it seems more specific. I’m coming around to “wadi” perhaps being the most clear and distinct term, even though it sounds unfamiliar in my particular dialect of English. On the plus side for those of us more familiar with “wash”, “wadi” is the same number of letters, and the first two letters are the same 
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